When businesses are considering implementing agile billing platforms to enable growth, the first question they usually have to answer is “Build or buy?” That is, should they build their own software from scratch or purchase from an established vendor? We’ve discussed the pros and cons at length, and to us, the answer is clear: cost, timing, quality, and longevity of the platform all point toward “buy” as the right choice — that is, assuming you select the right vendor to work with. There are plenty of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendors in the consumption billing space, but they aren’t all created equal. In this post, we break down the fundamental building blocks of the Gotransverse PaaS offering — and how the platform empowers our clients to meet and exceed their revenue goals through high-powered, agile billing.

The Gotransverse PaaS

The Gotransverse platform consists of four layers that power everything from product configurations to technology integration to the creation of custom rules to data management in every step of the order-to-cash process — ultimately leading to a seamless, accurate, efficient billing process, no matter the customer volume or the complexity of pricing models. Let’s take a look at each.

1. Application Layer

The application layer includes all the surface-level functionality billing and finance teams will use on a daily basis. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Usage and Rating: From the application layer, businesses collect how much customers are using particular products and services — and they can do this through any number of measurements, including minutes, impressions, storage, transactions, and more. Then, the rating engine takes all that usage data and converts it into invoice items with monetary values for the customer. Even better, the platform is engineered to accommodate limitless volumes and complex rules, so you can set the right pricing you need to get new customers, drive usage, and generate more revenue.

• Billing and Invoicing: Gotransverse gives businesses a single platform for accounts, billing, invoicing, payment processing, collections, and more. These customer-facing steps in the order-to-cash process are also contained in the application layer, providing accurate, on-time invoices — for simple and complex billing schedules and for users across the globe — to ensure the last step in the buyer journey leaves customers eager to come back for more.

• Revenue Management: Highly configurable revenue recognition capabilities, designed for complex pricing models are baked into the application layer to enable efficient, accurate decision making and forecasting based on near-real-time data. The Gotransverse PaaS is designed with high volumes of transactions and smart aggregation of financial information in mind.

• Add-On Services: A wide range of Gotransverse product add-ons enable businesses to fine tune the order-to-cash process according to their own unique usage-based models. From Mediation to Collections & Dunning to Tax Essentials and more, the Gotransverse PaaS offers all the billing capabilities businesses need to meet their growth goals.

2. Configuration Layer

The second layer, the configuration layer, includes all the tools and capabilities businesses need to set up the Gotransverse PaaS according to their specific needs and business processes.

• Tenant Management: Our PaaS platform is highly configurable at the tenant level, which includes business logic, security settings, etc.

• Business Process Automation: The Action Framework powers Gotransverse’s notification management system, which initiates internal or external workflows and notifications to automate your organization’s standard processes and communications. This means the Action Framework overcomes two of the biggest obstacles to a frictionless billing process: the lags and errors caused by manual processes, and the lack of transparency lets minor bugs become major problems.

• System Integration: It is likely that your business operates on a foundation of several different systems. Different products have different specialties, so it only makes sense that you would combine the tools that give you the best solution to meet your needs. But if your systems don’t play well with one another, you’ll be wasting a bunch of time and effort, reducing the value you get from each product. The Gotransverse platform is designed to solve this problem, integrating with existing payment, tax, CRM, ERP systems and more to ensure your entire technology ecosystem is fully in sync.

• Security: Finally, the Gotransverse PaaS enables business to configure ironclad security practices to ensure business and customer data stay secure in compliance with both regulatory requirements and company standards. Our suite of robust security features and policies include specifically defined user roles, single sign-on and mutual authentication options, automated log checks, intrusion detection systems, and disaster avoidance and recovery practices — just to name a few. In short, we’re dedicated to ensuring our customers’ data is safe at all times.

3. Developer Layer

At the developer layer, we start to really get under the hood, studying how the Gotransverse PaaS is built in order to provide so much user-friendly flexibility and billing power.

• API: The Gotransverse API, a RESTful API that uses JSON formatting, is embedded into your application and enables you to connect to other products and process by pulling data and information into Gotransverse or pushing it into other systems. This well-structured, granular API provides the endpoints you need to fully manage service and product monetization.

•  Microservices: The old-school way to develop software was to create monolithic applications whose functions were all intertwined, which meant that any update, fix or enhancement required that the whole application be taken apart and put back together. The old way doesn’t lend itself to much flexibility or growth. But the Gotransverse platform is built on microservices, meaning that the product is broken into groups where major features and functions operate independently from the rest, making it easier to update and add on to.

• Rule Scripting: When you need a custom rule for your organization, our rules scripting capability means you don’t have to wait for Gotransverse to code it — you can create it yourself. We support mediation rules, usage rules, revenue recognition rules, and more, opening up the opportunity for companies to create exactly what they need, for even the most unique cases.

4. Data Layer

The innermost layer, the data layer, contains the features and capabilities that empower Gotransverse users to store, protect, and manipulate their customers’ data — no matter how quickly it’s growing or where in the world they’re located.

• AWS Data Centers: With AWS data centers across the world (including, most recently, Sydney, Australia), Gotransverse is well equipped to support our global clients with swift customer deployment and compliance to international data regulations. These production environments enable specific regional requirements and give the Gotransverse family room to grow across the globe.

• Snowflake Data Lakes: Through Gotransverse Premier Data Access, we provide our clients with direct access to data (and thus the power to quickly generate comprehensive reports) via Snowflake datalakes. These reporting capabilities work hand in hand with popular reporting tools like Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Qlik Sense for simple and powerful visualization of data sets from Gotransverse as well as your ERP, CPM, and other data. In short, take advantage of Snowflake’s data lakes to get a 360° view into your revenue.

At every layer, the Gotransverse PaaS is designed to support our customers as they build their customer bases, add new geographic regions to their service areas, and adopt more complex billing models to attract and retain lifelong clients. To learn more, we invite you to take a virtual tour today. If you like what you see, request a demo to talk with one of our experts about whether Gotransverse is the right billing PaaS for your organization.