Austin, TX - January 30, 2013 - Gotransverse, makers of TRACT® usage-based billing software, today shared insight into billing trends among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and why more SMBs are opting to bill customers by usage or consumption.
According to the iGR whitepaper, Generating New Revenues: The Rise of Activity-Based Billing Models, more than 16 percent of SMBs still use a manual process for billing. This includes the use of spreadsheets and manual data entry to keep track of and process client invoices. While this is likely a good fit for a fledgling businesses, as the company scales, the number of customers and transactions processed grows as well. That growth often leads to billing mistakes and requires increased resources and time to accurately process bills and payments. Businesses can, and should, avoid this problem by shifting to an automated billing process.
It was also discovered that the use of usage-billed services grew by 49% amongst SMBs over the last two years. Based on this data, SMBs are embracing the use of services that are billed by usage or consumption and they are realizing the critical value these billing arrangements can provide.
“It’s great to see SMBs realize the critical value usage-based billing has on the bottom line,” said James Messer, Co-Founder, President, and CEO at Gotransverse. “We expect more businesses to follow suit as an usage-based billing model allows companies to remain nimble and realize increased revenue stream opportunities.”
iGR surveyed participants from a variety of SMBs with up to 500 employees for the study. As iGR put it, companies switching to usage-based billing had the "foresight to change the business model and processes to gain differentiation before the majority of the competition moves or the company’s business processes become too unwieldy and inflexible, thereby increasing the cost and risk associated with the change."