Enterprise billing refers to an advanced and sophisticated system designed to meet the complexities of large-scale businesses across all billing processes like invoicing, payment processing, dunning, collections, revenue recognition, taxation, credits and refunds, etc. It leverages automated and integrated tools that streamline the entire billing process and facilitate accurate and timely billing. While traditional billing software provides core functionality, there are significant differences in terms of capabilities and capacity.
Traditional Billing Software vs. Enterprise Billing Solutions: What’s the Difference?
The most pronounced differences between traditional billing software and enterprise billing solutions lie in their architecture, functionality, and features. While traditional billing software provides the basic functionality – invoicing, payment processing, and financial reporting – needed for single transaction purchases, it lacks the agility and features/functionality found in enterprise billing solutions.
For instance, traditional billing software is typically rigid, making it unsuitable to handle more complex billing scenarios such as those needed for recurring subscription-based invoicing and payments. Additionally, the term enterprise is synonymous with large-scale operations which includes a large customer base, a variety of pricing tiers, and in many cases a company that has international presence.
Let’s take a more in-depth look at the limitations of traditional billing software.
Traditional billing software:
- Built for the masses, it’s not for the diverse needs of today’s subscription economy
- Tends to operate in a reactive mode, hindering the ability to quickly innovate
- Provides limited (if any) custom automations and workflows
- Only offers support for basic pricing tiers
- Doesn’t support product configuration automation
- Provides only basic support for recurring subscription billing and payments
- Doesn’t provide the ability to create custom pricing models
- Doesn’t provide the tools needed for global expansion, such as language, currency, number fields, tax providers, payment providers, etc.
- Lacks the flexibility needed to handle today’s evolving payment technologies
- Doesn’t easily or efficiently integrate with other systems
- Aren’t built to scale
Enterprise billing solutions, on the other hand, are designed for large-scale operations, such as those found in software as a service (SaaS) subscription organizations. In addition to the basic functionality provided in traditional billing software, enterprise billing solutions provide advanced features and functionality, including scalability, real-time analytics, automation, seamless integration capabilities, global support, security, and much more.
Enterprise billing solutions:
- Allow for easy and accurate upgrading and downgrading between pricing tiers.
- Fulfill 100% of business requirements – mediation, rating, invoicing, collections, reporting, analytics, revenue recognition, and A/R subledger.
- Enable for fast introduction of innovative business models (subscription, flat rate, usage-based, hybrid, dynamic, and more).
- Allow business units to exist as separate sub-accounts of their larger, parent companies
- Seamlessly integrates to up and downstream systems (general ledger, tax solutions, CRM, ERP, BPM, RPA, etc.) for a fully integrated financial ecosystem.
- Provide business process workflow automation.
- Support a wide variety of electronic and manual payment methods.
- Provide an API-based payment gateway framework.
- Provide business intelligence through customizable reports, dashboards, and analytics.
- Offer customer self-service portals.
- Accelerate international growth by easily launching region-specific campaigns in any language and currency.
- Support compliance and security standards, including ASC 606, IFRS 15, SOC1/SOC2, PCI, etc.
Importantly, enterprise billing solutions automate enterprise-grade revenue lifecycle processes. From subscriptions to sophisticated usage-based pricing models and everything in between – without the need for manual intervention.
Enterprise Billing Challenges
Given the complex nature of their billing environments, enterprises face numerous challenges, including:
Complex organizational structures: Large organizations typically have multiple departments, diversions, and subsidiaries. When each of these units have specific billing requirements, it becomes difficult (if not impossible) to manage and consolidate billing information across the entire organization.
A variety of pricing models: Enterprises have large product catalogs that contain a multitude of configurations and pricing structures, making the process inefficient and error prone.
Inefficient billing processes: Whether using traditional billing software or are manually handling billing processes, the multitude of processes results in billing cycle delays.
Large customer bases: As the customer base increases so does the volume of transactions, compounding already complex billing processes.
Billing errors: Typically, a result of calculation errors, inaccurate invoices have the potential to result in customer dissatisfaction, customer churn, and revenue leakage.
Global tax compliance issues: Going global is complicated and when filing international taxes, managing exemptions, calculating VAT, the billing process becomes even more complex and error prone.
Enterprise Billing Solution Benefits
Tailored specifically for large organizations, enterprise billing solutions provide numerous benefits, including:
- Lower operational costs
- Elimination of manual errors and resource-intensive tasks
- Automation that improves efficiency and productivity
- Streamlined invoicing processes
- Advanced tools for improved payment processing, timely collections, and efficient dunning
- Enhanced billing and data management
- Faster time to market of new offerings and pricing models
- Business intelligence for informed and actionable decision making
- Support for a variety of pricing models
- Support for a variety of payment methods
- Improved customer experiences
- Security features to minimize risk and ensure compliance
Finally, a key benefit of an enterprise billing solution is in its ability to expand and adapt as your company grows. An enterprise-grade platform quickly and easily adjusts to market and customer changes. All without the cost of custom development – enabling you to prepare for the future… today.
The Solution for Enterprise Billing is Found in the Cloud
The need for greater agility is driving subscription-based enterprises to demand more agile billing solutions. Unlike many other enterprise billing systems that were migrated to the cloud, BillingPlatform’s enterprise-grade solution was born in the cloud. From product inception through to revenue recognition, BillingPlatform empowers organizations to monetize any revenue opportunity and deliver frictionless customer experiences.
With BillingPlatform, you get a powerful, yet easy to use enterprise billing system that supports all your business requirements. Our cloud-based enterprise billing system delivers the flexibility and agility needed to support any product, any service, and any pricing model. Our complete solution enables you to easily automate quote-to-cash processes – providing you with everything needed to run your enterprise business with greater efficiency, accuracy, and control.
The quick guided tour helps you see for yourself, go ahead and take one today!
