Can Legacy Billing Systems Keep Up with Today’s Marketing & Ad Tech Needs?

Once upon a time, most businesses managed their billing through manual, Excel-based systems or homegrown, DIY billing platforms. And while these were perfectly sufficient at one time — when the businesses using them were small, the models fairly simplistic and the markets moving a little slower — today, it’s likely outdated legacy billing platforms are hindering more business operations than they’re supporting.

And this is especially true in the Marketing and Ad Tech industry, which is defined by high volume, complex billing needs, from different usage-based models for every customer to real-time reporting to global transaction management. More and more, Marketing and Ad Tech companies that are clinging to legacy billing systems are being left behind.

The Trouble with Legacy Billing Systems

Legacy billing systems come with a range of drawbacks (and the older they are, the more trouble they can cause). For starters, many of them are built on outdated technology that no longer integrates with newer systems, meaning pairing the old billing platform with a new CRM, for example, may be a no go. This leads to redundancies in data input, gaps in processes and a huge hit to back-office efficiency. Further, the older these systems get, the more maintenance they need just to stay up and running. At a certain point, the cost of maintenance — in both IT support and lost opportunities from time offline — starts to outweigh the cost of replacing the system. Finally, these systems tend to be fairly inflexible. They work great for one or two business processes or models, but any new functionalities require significant investment from specialized personell to create and add on in new components. The resulting patchwork system often looks like something out of Frankenstein’s lab.

For businesses in the already crowded and rapidly growing Marketing and Ad Tech fields, these legacy billing systems are more than a headache. If left to hobble along too long, they can become a real competitive disadvantage, leading to decreased productivity, dissatisfied customers and lost revenue.

The Solution: Replacing Legacy Systems with Intelligent Billing

The inherent complexity in Marketing and Ad Tech billing leaves the door open for human error and billing inaccuracies, especially for businesses constantly battling the above challenges and constraints of legacy billing platforms. That’s why, today, an increasing number of finance leaders at Marketing and Ad Tech companies are turning to intelligent billing platforms like Gotransverse, which are designed to automate tracking, billing and reporting, and flexible enough to empower users to stay at the top of their markets.

Platforms like these deliver organization-wide benefits. These are just a few of the advantages of intelligent billing for product, operations and IT, and finance departments at Marketing and Ad Tech firms:

Product

The Gotransverse intelligent billing platform’s dynamic pricing capabilities and automated catalog management empower users to rapidly modify existing services and products and launch new ones in order to keep up with customer demand and stay ahead of the competition. (Learn more about how intelligent billing can accelerate time to market.)

Our platform also integrates seamlessly with Salesforce and other systems, without manual configuration, to streamline use, improve the customer experience and minimize the risks for conflicting or duplicate data. And what’s more, sophisticated intelligent billing systems support global customer acquisition and retention by automating transactions in multiple currencies and managing varying pricing structures for global marketplaces.

Operations & IT

We pride ourselves on our cloud-based platform’s ability to empower businesses to “monetize anything you can measure.” The platform seamlessly supports a huge range of billing models and strategies to create flexible offerings and bundles, applies pricing logic in real-time to balance supply with demand and integrates reporting systems to provide a single “source of truth” for front- and back-office teams.

Finance

Intelligent billing takes the headaches out of accounting by automating complex revenue recognition policies (and keeping them compliant with ASC606 and other regulations) and providing consistent visibility to the entire order-to-cash process. Further, dynamic pricing capabilities enable simplified account hierarchies, price changes and near-real-time rating, as well as multiple commercial price lists from a single product catalog.

With these benefits and more, intelligent billing is a huge boon for Marketing and Ad Tech firms, automating complex processes and freeing up time, energy and resources to focus on the products, services and relationships at the core of the business. To learn more about how intelligent billing can give your organization an invaluable competitive advantage, take a tour of the Gotransverse platform today, and call us to schedule your complimentary, personalized demo.

Clare Corriveau is the Director of Marketing at Gotransverse. An award winning marketer, over the last 10 years Clare has built her career in SaaS and demand generation. When she’s not kicking SaaS in marketer-mode, you can find her spending time with her husband and kids, hiking with her pup Pippa and cheering on Michigan State.