We recently wrote about how intelligent billing can alleviate jams in pricing and rating processes for fast-growing companies. But automated product catalog management and usage rating are just one subset of an intelligent billing platform’s capabilities. Really, the right platform can help your organization automate, optimize, and streamline the entire quote-to-cash process.

So let’s look now at the next steps of that process: billing and invoicing.

These are the steps where the finance team interacts with customers. If all goes well, the customers are satisfied, and they come back. They may even bring in more business through more purchases and referrals. But if not — if the invoices are incorrect or convoluted, or if the payment process is difficult to navigate — they’ll take their business elsewhere, and the stories they tell their friends won’t be so positive. Unfortunately, this scenario is not all that uncommon. In fact, research from MGI has found that almost 60 percent of companies cite billing disputes as a significant source of customer friction.

What’s causing these friction points? Likely, it’s a legacy or DIY billing system that requires a little too much handholding to function properly, leading to duplicated or incomplete data, missed deadlines, and small errors that, left unchecked, lead to nasty tangles.

But, in the same way it can help untangle the complications with pricing and rating, an intelligent billing platform like Gotransverse Billing and Invoicing can take the guesswork out of bill calculation, invoicing, and payments. Streamlining these steps frees up your accountants to focus on their real job and ensures a consistently smooth customer experience.

Let’s see how it works.

Seamless Bill Calculation

In one of our previous posts, you read about how the right rating engine can rate any usage event based on any number of unique rating rules. Now, the platform merges those events and calculates relevant fees and charges for every invoice line item. And it does all this in near-real-time, so you can batch run your bill cycle as frequently as necessary.

What’s more, the platform makes it simple to keep customer data up to date and organized, providing a unified and accurate view of every account and all customer activity. This means that anyone — the account managers behind the scenes or the customers, themselves — can check in anytime to see their account status, activities, payment methods, and any notifications available.

All this means that, when that invoice arrives in the customer’s inboxes, everything is correct and there are no surprises. Everyone is on the same page as to what every line item means.

Simplified Payments and Collections

Every client has his own preferred way to pay, and while traditional billing systems may be limited in the forms of payments they can accept, an intelligent billing platform like Gotransverse Billing and Invoicing can take bank cards, Paypal, ACH, checks and more, and it can take them on one-time and recurring cadences, manually or automatically.

With payments this simple, there’s no reason for an invoice to be overdue. But when it is, your billing can go beyond automated reminders and charge late fees, rerun failed payments, or even suspend services until payment is received.

And all of these transactions are made completely securely. The Gotransverse platform is PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 1 Type II certified and includes a 256-bit encryption of all data transmissions.

Billing may be the tail end of the customer experience, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important than the interactions that have come before. As a leader at one U.S. insurer told Forrester for The Forrester Wave™: Recurring Customer and Billing Management, Q3, 2017, “My billing experience is my top touchpoint. It’s where I make or break my business goals, so it’s where I need to advance my strategy.”

If your organization is ready to advance your billing strategy, we’d love to talk. Start by taking a tour of the Gotransverse platform to check out its capabilities. If you like what you see, schedule your complimentary, personalized demo today.