As we move into a new year (and a new decade, at that!), we’re willing to bet your business has big plans for growth. Whether you’re preparing to release new offerings, expand into new markets, or reach a whole new demographic, we’re willing to bet you’ve done your research and developed a rock-solid growth strategy. You know your audience as well as you know yourselves, you’ve studied the competition carefully and you’ve developed a roadmap to scale.

There’s just one question left: are your back-office systems ready to help you achieve that growth, or are they holding you back?

As exciting as it is — and it is very exciting — rapid growth brings plenty of challenges, too, particularly in the area of billing. Whether you’re adding new pricing models, new currencies, new product and service bundles, or new reporting schemes to your business, it’s critical to ensure your billing platform is up to the task. Otherwise, you run the risk of errors and delays leading to incorrect invoices, revenue leakage, and unhappy customers.

Why? Legacy and manual billing systems are often exactly what a small, young company needs. They manage low customer volumes and simple billing models with ease, but they aren’t built for the future, so when the needs get more complicated, they tend to balk.

Large and rapidly growing companies are better off with intelligent billing platforms that are designed with flexibility and scale in mind, empowering rather than hindering growth.

4 Ways Intelligent Billing Empowers Growth

Sophisticated Usage and Rating

One of the foundational functions of a billing system is to convert usage data into pricing in order to invoice customers and report revenue. While this is simple enough for businesses selling small volumes of widgets, the more varied and complicated the billing models become, the more difficult rating becomes. An intelligent billing platform is equipped to normalize data from a variety of inputs, in a variety of formats, converting every usage event into a billable data point. So whether you’re offering tiered, time-based, stored-value, or multidimensional payment models — or any combination of those models and others — invoices are always accurate and on time, and both you and your customers can see how much they owe at a moment’s notice.

Flexible Product Catalog

If your growth plan involves adding new products, services, or bundles, you’ll need a product catalog that’s easy to update as you adjust your offerings. While legacy and manual billing systems require a billing specialist and manual intervention to update the product catalog, an intelligent billing platform’s product catalog should be flexible enough to support evolving offerings. Manual updates often lead to SKU proliferation, customer confusion, and missed sales opportunities. But when you can automate the process of updating pricing and invoicing as you update your catalog, you minimize data redundancies, delays, and errors, empowering your business to roll out new products and services more quickly than your customers expect them.

Heightened Transparency

Too often, billing errors and revenue leakage are caused by a lack of transparency in the billing process. When we don’t have the opportunity to catch a glitch early, it snowballs into a big problem, so visibility at every step of the way is critical for successful billing, especially as your business grows and evolves. Legacy billing systems tend to allow only limited visibility into what’s happening behind the scenes. But with a sophisticated intelligent billing platform, crystal clear, near-real-time reporting gives sales, finance, and customer service teams the transparency they need to make sure everything’s running smoothly, avoiding revenue leakage and other costly mistakes.

Multiple Languages and Currencies

Is your business planning to scale outside of its current market and into other countries? If so, is your system equipped to handle additional languages, currencies, tax structures, and regulations? Businesses looking to work with customers across the globe require a sophisticated billing system that can handle rating, invoicing, and revenue management no matter the currency or the language.

To learn whether your company’s growth plans call for a new, more sophisticated billing system, we invite you to download our Executive Guide to Intelligent Billing. And when you’re ready, contact us for a free demo. One of our experts will be happy to talk through your business needs and walk you through our platform and process.