How to Streamline Your Billing Process for Multiple Products and Services

When it comes to increasing revenue, improving customer relationships and building up that bottom line, it’s no secret that diversified product and service lines are a powerful advantage. That’s why the hordes of software companies that have switched from traditional licensing to SaaS models have started taking the next step, adding consumption-based offerings that enable customers to add extra products and services to their subscriptions, customizing their packages to their unique needs.

We’ve written before about the benefits of consumption-based billing models, which give both companies and their customers added flexibility and transparency, allowing them to test new products and services with little risk of commitment. The enhanced customer relationships alone make these models an easy choice.

But how does all that flexibility impact the billing process?

Traditional Rating Methods

When Customer A’s monthly bill is based on one set of factors, Customer B’s is based on another and Customer C’s is different still, the challenge is reconciling the disparate usage data into clear, accurate invoices through a process called rating. (Download our infographic to learn about all the ways usage can be calculated.)

If Customers A, B and C are all a business has to worry about, it’s no problem to manually collect their usage data from the appropriate product and service lines and convert it into invoices. But when you get into high volumes of customers — hundreds or even thousands — a manual rating process is simply not feasible if efficient, accurate invoicing is a priority.

Many companies have built or purchased rating engines to add on to their existing billing systems. While these add-ons may improve the data normalization process in the short term, however, they’re a patchwork solution that likely won’t be flexible enough to scale and evolve with the business. While simply MacGyvering the existing system to meet complex rating needs may seem like a cost-effective solution, many businesses soon find that patching up their homegrown billing systems starts to require more time and resources than they’re worth as the business grows and changes.

Either of these traditional solutions is likely to leave users and their customers frustrated by inaccurate, inefficient and nontransparent billing process. And when messy billing becomes the norm, all the flexible offerings in the world won’t preserve customer loyalty.

Streamline Your Billing Process: Intelligent Billing

What these businesses really need is a billing platform designed specifically to handle high client volume and complex, variable billing models. An intelligent billing platform with a powerful, out-of-the-box rating engine gives companies an easy, automated way to slice and dice high quantities of data from any number of product or service lines and convert it to individual invoices at a moment’s notice.

This means account statements can be updated in real time so customers can check their status whenever they’d like, and it ensures clear, correct invoices that result in easy payments and satisfied customers. What’s more, when the automated data normalization and rating engine is built into the system from the ground up, it allows the business to update products and services as needed. There’s no more lag time while the IT team updates the billing system capabilities before a new offering can go live and start generating revenue. Also gone? The headaches that come from bolting on a new feature or patch every time there’s a change to the business model.

(Learn more about the benefits of intelligent billing.)

At Gotransverse, we offer the preeminent intelligent billing platform with an out-of-the-box rating engine that can aggregate and normalize high quantities of data from disparate sources and rate it according to as many custom rules as necessary. Our platform empowers users to drive more revenue, capture larger market share, and increase customer loyalty by offering their clients a pain-free billing experience every time. To learn more about how Gotransverse can help your business convert a legacy billing system, schedule your personalized demo today!

Michael Beamer is a 24-year technology and business leader with unique experience helping companies maximize the business impact of technology. In his current role as president of Gotransverse, he is dedicated to providing clients a flexible billing touch-point that creates long-lasting customer relationships and increasing customer lifetime value.