Chances are, if your business has been around for a while, a lot of your systems (including billing) are traditional on-premises software. While that certainly worked at first, while transactions were fairly simple, it’s likely that, as your business started to grow and your customers’ expectations evolve, those early systems required more and more hands-on intervention and/or customization to function the way you needed them to. And now, as you’re poised to scale, it’s a good bet your legacy billing platforms are more of a hindrance than a help.

The Problems with Legacy Systems

In today’s market, where customers are in control and businesses have more competition than ever, speed, and agility — the ability to launch new products and services, repackage offerings, and streamline the customer experience — are critical to maintaining a competitive edge.

Unfortunately, legacy systems often impede that agility, as they weren’t built to grow and evolve along with your business, but merely to support your business’ needs at the time it was implemented. This means new offerings and pricing models are difficult to configure and may require a billing specialist. Many of these systems are built on outdated technologies that preclude integrations with other systems, leading to gaps and redundancies in data, as well as additional customizations or manual interventions just to ensure billing processes are working as they should. And, of course, there are the increased maintenance needs that come with age.

What it all comes down to is that, if your business is in a place where it needs to be able to pivot and scale rapidly, it may be time to make some changes to your billing solution.

Updating Versus Replacing Legacy Systems

Often, businesses looking to optimize their tech take a lean approach, simply updating their current systems to save the costs of replacement. And while this may work for some businesses, the patchwork approach often leads to a cobbled-together system that simply limps along, requiring more time-consuming updates (and opening the door for more human error) with every business model change. As a result, companies that are dedicated to making their legacy system work tend to make business decisions based on their systems’ capabilities — not on the needs of their customers. This leads to diluted results, reduced customer-centricity, and a whole lot of missed revenue opportunities.

Instead, we recommend replacing the legacy system altogether with a platform designed to support a dynamic, growing business. While the upfront costs may be greater, the increased earnings potential (not to mention the long-term savings on legacy system maintenance and upgrades) will more than make up for it.

The Benefits of Intelligent Billing Platforms

Today, businesses that are looking to grow their market share and scale efficiently are turning to intelligent billing platforms. Flexible enough to empower users to stay at the top of their markets and designed to automate tracking, billing, and reporting, these cloud-based systems deliver organization-wide benefits with a lasting impact on the bottom line.

Configurable to Your Business’ Needs

The right intelligent billing platform can accommodate any combination of subscription and usage-based billing models and promotional configurations, empowering your organization to package and bill for goods and services in a wide variety of ways, responding to customer demand and maximizing revenue potential at every turn. And all of this with no billing specialist required!

Ready for Launch

Because the intelligent billing platform is so configuration-friendly, users can launch new products and services quickly, rather than weeks or months legacy systems might require. As you track and forecast market trends, you’ll be able to respond to customer needs almost before they’re even aware of them.

Scalable

Ideally, the evolutions your business is undergoing are leading to rapid growth in your customer base, whether you’re attracting new buyers in your current market or capturing a brand-new market segment. While legacy systems shudder at the idea of rapid growth, a cloud-based intelligent billing platform is built to scale right along with you, adding capacity as needed to seamlessly manage increased volume and complexity, even managing currencies, taxes, languages, and payment methods across multiple countries.

Easy-to-Integrate

The key to a successful back-office ecosystem is ensuring each platform plays well with all the others. While legacy systems tend to function in silos, requiring manual data transfer from one system to another, intelligent billing platforms are built to work in tandem with your CRM, CPQ, and any other system, creating automatic workflows and seamlessly sharing data from platform to platform. More automation leads to faster processes, less room for human error, and happier, long-term customers.

These are just a few of the benefits of implementing an intelligent billing platform. If your business’ legacy system is holding you back, we invite you to learn more about the power of intelligent billing today. And when you’re ready, call Gotransverse to schedule your complimentary, personalized demo.