Preventing Revenue Leakage Through Intelligent Billing

A recent report from MGI revealed that 42% of companies experience revenue leakage. That doesn’t sound good (when do leaks ever sound good?), but what does it mean, exactly? “Revenue leakage” is what happens when businesses inadvertently leave money on the table. While these leaks can be on the expense side, they’re more often the result of under billing customers — or failing to bill them altogether — for the products and services they’ve used.

So if just under half of companies experience this revenue leakage, how much are they missing out on? While statistics vary, the general consensus is that current systems allow for leakage of about 2 to 5% of a business’ revenue. If you’re a million-dollar company, that means you’re losing up to $50,000 per year — and that number will only grow as your business does. Unless you make a change to plug the leak.

What Causes Revenue Leakage?

As billing models get more complicated — and rightfully so — in order to meet users’ needs and build lasting customer relationships, so does the process of tracking and billing for everything customers are consuming. When businesses are selling individual products in one-off transactions, or even uniform simple subscriptions, that’s one thing: every subscription costs the same, every product has a fixed price and everything is billed the same way. But when you start throwing consumption-based billing into the mix, providing a la carte services, balancing multiple usage and rating models, and offering customers a variety of unique plans, you can see how keeping track of everything — and billing appropriately for it — could start to look like a juggling act.

For companies using outdated billing systems or, worse, manual systems managed in Excel spreadsheets, the challenge is exponentially bigger. That’s because these systems aren’t designed to manage the complexity of today’s consumer-focused business models. They often can’t efficiently track who’s using how much of any given service, update product catalogs to reflect new pricing structures, or adjust invoices to account for special circumstances like overages, surcharges, or even individual discounts.

The result: missed billing opportunities and lost revenue.

How Can Your Organization Avoid Revenue Leakage?

The good news is that growing companies that want to maximize their potential revenue can take advantage of a solution that enables accurate, efficient usage-based billing and eliminates leaks. Intelligent billing platforms like Gotransverse are designed to do exactly that.

Here are just a few of the ways Gotransverse helps companies ensure they’re not leaving any money on the table:

1. Usage-Based Models

The Gotransverse platform has a powerful, built-in rating engine that converts usage data to invoice-ready pricing under a wide variety of billing models based on customers’ needs and preferences as well as the requirements of different product and service lines. Whether you’re using flat fees, tiers, tapers, family plans, time-based pricing, allowances, multi-dimensional models, or any combination of the above, our intelligent billing system eliminates the headaches and the risk of error that come with manual data mediation, and it increases the customer lifetime value by automating renewals and highlighting up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

2. Flexible Product Catalog

While legacy and manual billing systems require significant hand-holding (and often a billing expert) to update pricing and invoicing based on changes to the product catalog, Gotransverse’s intelligent billing platform is equipped with a flexible product catalog that supports evolving models to prevent missed revenue, along with customer confusion, missed cross-sell or up-sell opportunities, incorrect orders, product cannibalization, and SKU proliferation. When you’re ready to update pricing, your system can make it happen without any loss from gaps or redundancies in data, lag time resulting from manual processes or errors due to miscommunication between systems.

3. Near-Real-Time Reporting

One of the key drivers behind missed revenue leakage is lack of transparency. Many manual and outdated billing systems allow only limited visibility into what’s happening behind the scenes, making it difficult for the sales, finance, and customer service teams to catch glitches before they become problems. But with a sophisticated intelligent billing platform, crystal clear, near-real-time reporting offers users the transparency they need to make sure everything’s running smoothly. From pricing errors to early signs of customer dissatisfaction, this transparency empowers users to react and adapt in order to maximize revenue opportunities.

If your organization is fighting revenue leakage, Gotransverse’s intelligent billing platform may be the solution you need to stop leaving money on the table. Interested in learning more about how intelligent billing can give your business a powerful competitive advantage? Schedule your complimentary, personalized demo today.