Gotransverse Travel Diaries: North American Finance Executive Summit 2022

The North American Finance Executive Summit (NAFES) is the industry’s leading collection of finance professionals, executives, thought leaders, and innovators. This year’s event took place in Phoenix, Arizona, and we were proud to be among the exhibitors. Joe Goldschmidt, Director of Sales at Gotransverse, and Keith Karp, Director of Customer Solutions, enjoyed conversations about digital transformation and automation of billing systems to create efficient work environments, maximize work productivity, and help retain talent.

What is NAFES?

NAFES “brings together the "who's who" of industry executives, cutting-edge service and solution providers, and media partners from across North America to network, benchmark, share, and learn real-world solutions to universal challenges that face every Finance professional in their daily work.”

Why? Because finance executives are under rising pressure to constantly be on the lookout for both threats and opportunities, keeping a finger on the pulse of the market, the economy, and available technology solutions in order to shape company strategy and ensure financial stability, compliance, and discipline across their organizations.

Where Does Gotransverse Fit In?

With every industry facing rapid changes—in customer expectations, market pressures, economic forecasts, and technological possibilities—finance leaders are looking for ways to streamline billing practices to ensure agility, efficiency, stability, and airtight compliance and security.

Fortunately, that’s our expertise.

Here are just a few of the conversation topics Goldschmidt and Karp touched on over and over again with finance leaders at NAFES22:

Digital Transformation, Corporate Efficiency, & Employee Retention

With razor-thin margins pushing corporate leaders to find ways to do more with less, one area that’s rife with opportunity is billing. Manual billing processes, and those requiring significant human input or intervention, lead to costly delays and errors in billing—not to mention frustrated customers and employees.

However, by embracing cloud-based, intelligent billing solutions, businesses can automate tedious billing processes, increase transparency in every step of the quote-to-cash process, and enable faster, more accurate invoicing, payments, and revenue recognition.

This process leads to a dramatically improved customer experience. Still, it also has significant internal benefits, freeing up employee time for more strategic, lucrative initiatives and reducing costly employee turnover by minimizing the headaches, frictions, and tedium involved in day-to-day work.

Recession-Proofing Revenue with Consumption-Based Monetization

Consumption-based billing is a hybrid model that couples subscription services with additional pay-as-you-go offerings that take on a variety of structures. These include simple, pay-as-you-go usage fees to more sophisticated rating models—based on a business's specific needs. The advantages of consumption-based billing for a company and its customers are a powerful counter to the economic pressures businesses have faced since the beginning of COVID 19—and continue to face as recession looms.

For businesses, consumption-based models preserve the predictability of recurring revenue—which enhances forecasting abilities and is attractive to investors—while eliminating the natural revenue limits a subscription imposes. In addition, separating the "extras" from the foundation enables businesses to track and analyze usage data more effectively and update offerings in real-time to maximize value and stay on top of the market.

For customers, a consumption-based pricing model provides total transparency around what they're paying for versus what they're getting. Additionally, it lowers the barrier of entry for untested products, allowing them to try something new without making a risky (and costly) long-term commitment. This model has been significant as economic turmoil has had customers tightening their budgets. Underused subscriptions aren't making the cut, but consumption-based pricing makes it much easier for customers to maximize the value they’re getting for the price of entry.

Eliminating Revenue Leakage

Leaving money on the table is never good business, even in the best of economic conditions. Yet revenue leakage is another challenge many finance leaders are battling within their organizations.

This slow, unintended, and often unnoticed loss of money due to small errors or gaps in billing processes affects 42 percent of companies, according to MGI research. And EY suggests that companies should expect a potential leak of 1 to 5 percent realized EBITDA.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Features to look for to ensure your billing platform can prevent costly revenue leakage include automated billing processes, powerful mediation capabilities, integration with other systems, flexible configuration, and crystal-clear transparency. By implementing an agile billing solution designed to handle complex models, high volumes, and constant change with ease, businesses can rest assured they’re no longer leaving money on the table.

The Big Picture: Connecting Finance to Other Business Areas

One of the biggest drivers of billing errors is when different departments work in silos, and one can’t easily see what the others have done. After all, finance is about more than just that final invoice. It touches sales as reps put together quotes for customers, legal as those pre-negotiated terms find their way into the contract, customer service as customer-facing teams deliver the products or services ordered, etc.

So, because finance is directly or indirectly involved in so much of the customer experience, siloed systems quickly become a hindrance as business operations grow more complicated. Agile billing, on the other hand, automates workflows across departments, brings transparency to the quote-to-cash process, and manages company-wide data seamlessly, empowering the business in countless ways.

From Phoenix to Austin: Continuing Conversations About the Future of Billing

We loved talking about all of these billing topics and more with attendees at NAFES22, and we’d love to continue those conversations—with the new friends we made in Phoenix and with any business leaders who are looking for more effective ways to navigate billing needs in today’s economy and beyond. We invite you to learn more about Gotransverse by taking a tour of our platform today. Then, when you’re ready, request a demo, and one of our experts will be happy to walk you through our platform and processes.