In Billing, to Err Is Human; to Automate, Divine

Does your organization’s legacy billing system require a significant amount of manual work to complete billing, collections, and accounts receivables transactions? Have you ever taken a moment to account for how that affects your billing efficiency? McKinsey recently reported that 60 percent of B2B transactions require some kind of manual intervention, each adding 15 to 20 minutes to the process. That adds up to an additional hour of work for every three to four transactions!

But additional time aside, consider how all the additional manual efforts may impact accuracy in billing and reporting. As accounting teams are spending more and more of their already limited time managing the very systems that are supposed to support their work—calculating pricing, checking data, managing workflows, creating invoices, etc—it’s inevitable that the additional labor will lead to errors, and that those errors will build on one another, snowballing minor miscalculations into catastrophes.

That’s not anything against your organization’s finance team. It’s one thing to manually track one-time purchases and simple subscriptions, but when businesses start working with consumption-based pricing models, keeping track of individual usage time, add-ons, tiers, and tapers and everything else that will go into each customer’s invoice…well, you can see how it might start to get messy, no matter how skilled the accountants. Manually managing high volumes of complex transactions without the occasional error is all but impossible. In fact, MGI research reports that 59 percent of companies experience significant customer friction related to billing disputes, and Dow Jones has cautioned that a significant number of manual interfaces between systems increases control risks. And the higher the volume and the more complex the transactions, the more frequently those errors will slip through the cracks.

Unfortunately, this natural human error can be more than just a source of frustration and wasted time. Today’s consumers are essentially acting as “free agents,” and when one product or service provider fails to live up to their ever-growing standards, they’re quick to shift allegiances to a new provider that can. The result: a dwindling customer pool, loss of revenue, and a declining bottom line.

So how can your organization overcome the inefficiencies and inaccuracies that inevitably arise from manual, or manually supported, billing processes?

Automate Processes through Intelligent Billing to Eliminate Human Error

The problem with many of these legacy systems is that, while they are powerful enough to handle small volumes of fairly simple transactions, they’re not designed to grow with your organization. The once-manageable levels of human intervention become cumbersome at best (and devastating at worse) as the number and complexity of the transactions increases, drowning team members in tedious, repetitive work that takes away from their core business functions and leaving customers frustrated and ready to bail.

But periods of rapid growth should be times for innovation, strategic work and, of course, celebration — and they can be, when managed correctly. Successful growth requires more powerful systems, and in the finance department, that likely means an intelligent billing platform.

These cloud-based systems, like the Gotransverse platform, are designed to take the handholding out of every step of the order-to-cash process, from usage event to invoice to payment and revenue reporting. No longer are employees spending their valuable time and energy juggling conflicting data and convoluted spreadsheets. Instead, they’re focusing on critical business strategy while the intelligent billing platform automates the grunt work. The result: human error is eliminated, front- and back-office processes become clear and transparent, and customers churn decreases while customer lifetime value and revenue both continue to rise.

To learn more about the power of intelligent billing platforms to automate processes and give your organization a competitive edge, we invite you to download our executive guide to intelligent billing. If you’re ready to take your organization’s billing capabilities to the next level, take a tour of the Gotransverse platform today, and call us to schedule your complimentary, personalized demo.