Gotransverse End-to-End Billing Solution: Don’t Worry, Bill Happy Series

On its face, the billing process may seem quick and easy: send the customer an invoice, collect the payment, and voilà! Well, not so fast. The transaction itself is just one small part of the equation. In reality, billing comprises the entire quote-to-cash process, including everything from presales discussions with potential customers to revenue recognition.

For companies looking to adopt complex billing models to meet growing customer demand for usage-based and subscription purchasing, the first step is to ensure your billing system can provide true end-to-end support for every stage of that process. Integrating every piece of the tech ecosystem and automating key workflows ensures transparent, accurate, and seamless end-to-end billing—both internal and customer-facing.

Let's look at the components of the quote-to-cash process and how Gotransverse helps businesses simplify every step of the way.

Pre-Sales Conversations

It all starts with your sales team's discussions with potential clients, talking them through products and services, understanding their interests, and going over budgets and pricing. And the foundation of these conversations is your CRM, where customer data and interaction histories are recorded.

What does this have to do with billing? A lot.

Suppose your billing system is out of sync with your CRM. In that case, you're liable to end up with redundant or incomplete data, causing marketing mishaps that make that would-be frictionless customer experience bumpy from the get-go, ruining that all-important first impression. But when the CRM and the billing model are in sync, so are the sales, marketing, and finance teams. So, a billing system, like the Gotransverse platform, that integrates with other operations technology to eliminate silos and maximize visibility is critical from step one.

Quote-to-Cash

When a customer is ready to think seriously about buying, the sales team should have a variety of offerings at their fingertips, ready to show prospects. This process includes pricing information for various individual and bundled products and any discounts or deals from your usage-based billing models. If these aren’t easily accessible and fully baked—if the quote process involves a lot of paper shuffling, ad-hoc price conjecture, and back-and-forth—then the customer journey becomes confusing and frustrating for all parties involved. (Not to mention introducing the potential for errors further down the line, from contract execution to fulfillment to invoicing.) But with the sleek, integrated Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tools that come with sophisticated billing platforms like Gotransverse, it’s easy to show the customer all of their options in a way that empowers them to make an informed decision.

Order-to-Cash

When a customer pulls the trigger on order, this sets off several different workflows that get other departments involved to ensure the order is processed and fulfilled correctly and quickly. Again, when teams work in silos on their discrete pieces of the job, it can be nearly impossible to be sure everyone's operating from the same information and everything's moving forward correctly.

So, look for a billing system that automates these workflows, including all the notifications and updates that every participant needs to receive. This way, it's easy to check the progress of an order in real-time, anytime, to ensure the customer is getting what they've requested.

Invoice Billing

Here's the part of the transaction consumers know best—and often dread. But, like every part of the billing process, if a business has suitable systems, even invoicing can be a positive part of the customer experience.

In today’s digital, customer-driven world, businesses are juggling high volumes of transactions based on various billing models, meaning that invoicing for most competitive companies is more challenging than filling out a template. Of course, the more manual intervention this process requires, the more room there is for errors—delivering invoices late due to inefficient processes, inadvertently leaving money on the table by underbilling customers, or making them angry by overbilling them. However, a platform like Gotransverse takes away both the risk and the headache by tracking and managing complex pricing, mediation, and rating scenarios at high volumes to ensure every customer gets an accurate, easy-to-read invoice on time.

Collection

Of course, the ease of paying that invoice is critical to the customer experience and the business's bottom line. As consumers, we want to authorize autopay, hand over cash, swipe a card, or type in the number and be done with it. And businesses want that, too. Fortunately, a sophisticated billing engine like the Gotransverse platform can simplify it.

With the right platform, it’s also easy to automate late payment reminders, payment retries, dunning reminders and systems, cure actions, and more to ensure every invoice is paid without tarnishing the customer experience or losing out on earned revenue.

Revenue Recognition

Once the invoice has been paid, the customer can go on their merry way, but the business isn’t quite finished with the transaction. Now, it’s time to recognize and report the revenue in compliance with regulations like ASC 606. Done manually or in conjunction with a legacy billing system, this process can be time-consuming and tedious; if done incorrectly, it can lead to financial consequences. But billing platforms like Gotransverse can also automate this step, managing accounts receivable needs and ensuring traceability, accuracy, and compliance to set your business up for successful audits.

Leveraging Billing Data

These billing activities create enormous data on business operations, customer preferences, revenue, etc. And while not officially part of the quote-to-cash process, leveraging that data to mine strategic insights and power-informed decision-making can make a measurable difference in a business's reputation, operations, and bottom line.

However, a business needs a billing system in sync with its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to turn complex, high-volume billing data into easily digestible, aggregated insights within your general ledger. In short, billing needs to integrate with the ERP as seamlessly as it does with the CRM.

A lot goes into a frictionless billing process; with proper end-to-end support, it can be manageable. At Gotransverse, we know what's at stake every step of the way, and we pride ourselves on being the only platform you need for billing, pricing, and revenue management. We invite you to tour our platform today to learn more about how we automate end-to-end billing. Then, when you're ready, request a demo, and one of our experts will be in touch to walk you through our platform and processes.

Gotransverse’s "Don't Worry, Bill Happy" series is a "back to basics" look at foundational components of modern billing systems and how the Gotransverse platform makes even the most complex billing needs easy.