Don’t Worry, Bill Happy: High-Volume & Scalable Billing

Gotransverse’s “Don’t Worry, Bill Happy” series—created with thanks to Bobby McFerrin—is a “back to basics” look at foundational components of modern billing systems and processes and how the Gotransverse platform makes even the most complex billing needs easy. This week, we take a look at volume and scalability in billing.

Is your organization ready to grow? You've got the business plan buttoned up, but are you ready to exponentially increase your customer base, expand to global markets, and overhaul your packages and business models? And doing it so customers can purchase and pay for exactly what they need, when they need it?

But do you have the systems in place to empower that growth?

If not, then no matter how airtight your growth strategy may be before you know it, you’ll start to feel growing pains. In particular, hiccups in your billing processes: inaccurate invoices, rating errors, revenue leakage, and jammed payments are clogging the system—and frustrating customers.

Unfortunately, this isn’t all that unusual. As companies scale, it’s common to find that the billing systems that were perfectly serviceable in the early days aren't built to grow with the business. Suddenly, the finance teams are spending their time manually tracking transactions, organizing data, and maintaining the billing platform, rather than focusing on the work at the core of their jobs. And the more manual and disjointed the process becomes, the more errors, delays, and abnormalities slip through the cracks.

To empower frictionless growth, businesses need billing platforms that support high volume and rapid scale.

At a systems-and-processes level, outdated systems that resist change, balking at increased volume, or shying away from complex usage-based billing models are holding many companies back from effective growth.

For example, Ytel is a cloud communications platform that was having trouble meeting growing billing needs as they supported a rapidly growing customer base who bought and paid for services through a wide variety of "packages," including simple subscriptions, prepaid accounts, volume-based packages and more. However, their internally-developed billing system couldn't keep pace, and they found themselves dealing with significant revenue leakage. But by implementing Gotransverse’s cloud-based agile billing platform, Ytel was able to shore up its financial systems to support its growth, automating billing with unprecedented accuracy, streamlining billing management, rolling out new revenue models and more — all without needing a billing specialist on staff, lag time, or interruption to the customer experience.

What Makes a Billing Platform Growth-Friendly?

Elasticity

One serious impediment to business growth at any level can be capacity. Does your hardware-based legacy billing system support your current customer volume? Great, but what if that volume begins to multiply tomorrow? You’d have to add additional hardware to meet capacity, which requires significant lead times that can make it difficult to keep up with growth. But what’s more, scaling a hardware-based system means adding fixed capacity — meaning you have to add enough capacity to handle peak load even if your systems will rarely be operating at that level. In other words, you’re paying for space you aren’t using. This requirement can be a significant hindrance to growth, especially for businesses that may not have the cash to pay for once-in-a-while usage volumes.

If growth is on the menu, you want to look for a cloud-based agile billing platform that offers elasticity. An elastic model is designed specifically to fluctuate with the user’s needs, meaning capacity can be provisioned or reduced as necessary to match usage patterns. Unlike traditional scalability, with the right elastic cloud system, there is no upper limit on performance and very little lag time when you’re ready to expand or contract. Because platforms like Gotransverse’s are cloud-based, their capacity can be adjusted as necessary, and very quickly, to match the peaks and valleys in usage. In other words, at any given moment, you’re only paying for what you use, and yet your system supports nearly limitless volume.

Parallel Processes

A platform built for parallel processing is, to put it simply, a fantastic multitasker, designed to manage many processes at once. It creates different threads that each action on the split process and prevent bottlenecks in the data waiting to be processed. While a less powerful billing system might require several days to process all the transactions (or weeks, if the process requires a lot of manual input), an intelligent billing platform is equipped to handle those same transactions — and millions more — in near real-time. This means growing businesses can manage growing rating, invoicing, and reporting needs without significantly increasing their processing time.

Flexibility

Especially when a company is growing fast, agility is paramount. From upgrading products, services, and bundles to handling any surprises the market throws you way. Scaling fast often requires changing fast. So, look for a platform that has key features built-in (and won’t require time-intensive add-ons for every new capability), offers streamlined configurability, and includes a flexible product catalog to support evolving offerings without the risks of SKU proliferation, customer confusion, and missed sales opportunities.

Ready to Scale Your Business?

Gotransverse is the intelligent billing platform you can count on to handle high-volume scalability with incredible accuracy. Our intelligent billing system automates nearly every aspect of the quote-to-cash processand has all the critical capabilities (including parallel billing) built in, which means supporting limitless volumes is easy! To learn more, take a virtual tour of our billing platform today. Then, when you’re ready, request a demo to find out whether Gotransverse is the right billing partner for your organization.