Your organization’s growing fast. Your customer base — and the number of usage events per customer — has increased exponentially over the last few months, with no sign of slowing down. It feels as though you’ve finally cracked the code, identifying exactly what customers want, and delivering it to them in the right package, at the right time, at the right price.

But slowly, you start to see hiccups in your billing processes: inaccurate invoices, rating errors, revenue leakage, and jammed payments are clogging the system — and frustrating customers.

If this sounds familiar, your organization is not alone. As companies scale, it’s common to find that DIY or legacy billing systems that were perfectly serviceable in the early days just 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.

An organization that’s looking to scale needs systems that can scale with it, and for the finance team, that means an intelligent billing platform designed to handle limitless volumes and complex transactions in a fully automated quote-to-cash process.

For an in-depth look at the power of intelligent billing, we recommend you read our Buyer’s Guide to Intelligent Billing Platforms, but for now, let’s take a look at a few ways the right platform can empower businesses to scale their volume without scaling their billing efforts.

3 Ways the Right Platform Can Enable High-Volume Billing

1.   Supporting Limitless Volumes

When you’re looking to scale your business, it’s a no-brainer that you need systems designed to grow with you. But when it comes to your billing platform, traditional scalability isn’t exactly right. Scalability refers to the ability to add capacity to meet peak load conditions, but here’s the catch: you’re adding fixed capacity, which translates to higher costs and is often underutilized. After all, it’s important to have enough capacity to handle peak load, but rarely will your systems be at max level. Additionally, the extra hardware and software comes with significant lead times, meaning it can take months to scale, making it difficult for the systems to keep up with the growth.

In an intelligent billing platform, what you want to look for instead is 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. When looking at the different cloud tools, elasticity is not created equal. Some tools have limitations with how quickly they can spin up and down new servers, so if high volumes are important to you, be sure to investigate.

2.   Parallel Billing Allows for Mass Processing

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.

3.   Key Capabilities Are Built In, Not Added On

While it would theoretically be possible to add elasticity, parallel processing, and other growth-friendly features to your existing billing platform, the danger of DIY billing platforms is that they often turn into sprawling, patchworked Frankenstein’s monsters. These monstrosities tend to cost more in the long run — in time, manpower, and money — to build and maintain than an upfront investment in a more powerful system designed specifically to meet your organization’s needs.

However, when you partner with a vendor like Gotransverse to implement an intelligent billing platform, you know you’re getting capabilities that were built in from the ground up. Every piece of the platform is designed specifically to work together to manage your billing needs — no matter the volume — and makes sure you aren’t running the risk of having to spend time and energy coordinating disparate functions to ensure accuracy and efficiency.

Big growth is an exciting time and a huge accomplishment for any business, but too many have learned the hard way that, without the right systems in place, the growing pains can become unmanageable. Not every intelligent billing platform is equal, but the right one can make a world of difference in automating and optimizing processes to allow for scale. To learn more about the power of intelligent billing, and to find out whether the Gotransverse platform is right for your organization, we invite you to tour our platform and schedule your personalized demo today.