Imagine what your finance team could accomplish with a few extra hours each day. Imagine no longer having to juggle the manual labor of tracking customer usage events, producing invoices, and reporting revenue. No longer having to explain to customers why invoices are late or inaccurate, and no longer combatting revenue leakage or worrying that reporting practices aren’t compliant with new government regulations.

Here’s some surprising data from McKinsey about billing efficiency: 60 percent of B2B transactions require some kind of manual intervention, and each one adds 15 to 20 minutes to the process. That’s an entire day’s work for every 25 to 30 transactions — not to mention additional delays and frustrations caused by inevitable human error. How can that be sustainable for a growing company?

On the flip side, businesses that streamline their billing processes through automation have a powerful opportunity to take back those hours. At first blush, the idea of automation can sound intimidating. Leadership may write it off as too costly or difficult to implement, while employees fear it may cost them their jobs. But in reality, automation is meant to make their jobs easier, making tedious manual tasks quick and easy, increasing transparency to head off mistakes before they turn into crises, and freeing up resources for more valuable work that drives business growth and employee engagement. In fact, CIO reports that 78 percent of workers agree that “automating manual, repetitive tasks would allow them to focus on the more interesting and rewarding aspects of their jobs.”

Here are three key ways billing automation can enhance a business’s operations and growth.

Powering Exponential Growth

While manual processes may work just fine when a company is small, they become unwieldy as it grows, and this is true in any facet of business operations, including billing. At a certain point, these manual interventions inhibit further growth. But with automated billing processes, processing a million transactions is no more difficult than a thousand, and updating offerings and pricing schemes becomes much easier, allowing businesses to stay ahead of customer needs. But not only does automation make growth physically possible, it also saves businesses money as they scale. That’s largely because, once menial tasks are automated, companies can conserve budget by doing far more with their existing teams. In fact, depending on your industry, Process.St reports that automation can cut costs by a margin of 10 to 90 percent and boost productivity by 30 to 40 percent.

Improving Customer Relationships

According to MGI research, 59 percent of companies experience significant customer friction related to billing disputes. And here again, those errors caused by manual interventions are largely to blame. Dealing with these disputes takes more valuable time and resources away from the finance team and, even if individual disputes are resolved, they can have costly long-term repercussions. It’s a buyer’s market in just about every industry these days, and when customers don’t feel like their chosen vendors are living up to their high expectations or standards, it’s easier than ever to shift their loyalty to a vendor that can. Messy billing processes can drive customers away, shrinking revenue significantly. But a smooth, efficient billing process powered by automation can help ensure customers have a great experience every time they buy from your brand — meaning they’ll come back next time, and they’ll tell their friends.

Eliminating Revenue Leakage

MGI Research has found that 42 percent of companies experience revenue leakage. “Revenue leakage” refers to what happens when businesses inadvertently leave money on the table, most often as a result of under billing customers — or failing to bill them altogether — for the products and services they’ve used. It’s a safe bet that many of these costly errors can be traced back to manual tracking of customer behavior. After all, no matter how talented finance employees are, manually managing high volumes of complex transactions — tracking individual usage time, add-ons, tiered pricing, varying renewal dates, and everything else that goes into each invoice — is a messy prospect.

Agile billing platforms are designed to remove the manual burdens of tracking, calculating, invoicing, and reporting revenue, among other things, keeping financial data up to date to ensure accurate billing and close those revenue leaks.

The advantages of automation are significant, to say the least, and businesses who are looking to scale rapidly, remaining agile as they grow, would be wise to automate as many key processes as possible, starting with their billing systems. To learn more about the power of agile billing platforms to automate processes and give your organization a competitive edge, we invite you to, take a tour of the Gotransverse platform today. When you’re ready, give us a call to schedule your complimentary, personalized demo.