Is your billing and invoicing process one of the essential things you worry about? Are you still relying on various spreadsheets to bill your clients? A strategically chosen billing system can automate your back-office tasks and reduce the number of late payments you receive.
In fact, most companies still process most of the invoices manually or mainly manually. However, manual processing requires a lot of human involvement and multiple touchpoints. So, a billing and invoicing platform with modern billing management and up-to-date features can help you meet today’s billing and accounting requirements.
That’s why you should explore the advantages of automated billing system software to manage your business and reduce time and mistakes!
Table of contents
What is a billing system?
A billing system is a complex software that creates and automates payments, invoices, revenue, and much more. It enables insightful analytics – review of recurring revenues, business data, and reports.
In addition, the billing system is a sub-ledger for many enterprises where the incoming revenues can be viewed in detail. As a result, activation, controlling, rating, invoicing, dunning, and collections are all part of a good online billing system.
Does my business need a modern billing system?
As we already said, businesses use billing systems to generate and send invoices to their customers or partners and receive payments. Consequently, the billing system helps companies improve performance and reduce errors by automating document preparation and other routine tasks.
If you’re looking to adopt billing software, you have two options. Either choose a ready-made solution or select and develop a custom billing system.
Simple solutions vs. Advanced software
Simple billing solutions with some basic functionalities can automatically send out bills to customers and reduce your wait time to get the payments. Here’s what you usually get when adopting a simple solution:
- basic features: software has the essential features for billing automation, including invoice templates, reminders, and reporting tools
- no training and setup: software has easy-to-use functionalities that anyone can understand
However, you may encounter a problem once you need more unique features or a higher level of customization.
Simple billing solutions can limit you if you work with different customer groups who need different treatments, depending on their billing models, languages, and compliance regulations.
It will not be helpful if you have a complex system of discounts, fees, or department limits to navigate.
Advanced billing software
Advanced billing software, often called enterprise billing software, is developed by a professional team that designed the software to be configurable to support any billing use case.
This software can help you tackle all the current problems and challenges your finance/accounting department faces.
But how? By configuring the software for your specific business needs.
Here are some benefits you will unlock with advanced configurable software:
- complete system integration: no matter how complex your billing process is, configurable software will allow you to integrate not only the market leaders but all services through existing out-of-the-box integrations, and configurable imports/exports
- advanced functionality: the software allows you to set up use-case-specific workflows, targeted analytics, and more to meet your requirements fully
- high scalability: modern software has a modular convergent architecture. It is scalable to handle higher loads of traffic and has no downtimes, allowing you to expand without worrying about limitations
When searching for the best billing software for your enterprise, consider the complexity and limitations of your current billing system and your business goals.
If you think your business could benefit from a new billing system, we recommend adopting custom billing software instead.
Advanced billing software can be configured to fit the requirements of different industries, not only specific clients.
For example, telecommunication service providers prefer more complex telecom billing software due to their customer type and pricing variations.
On the other hand, energy & utility companies typically have an advanced customer lifecycle and deal with industry transformations. They require functions like seamless integrations with smart meters or ratio utility billing system (RUBS).
All this just calls for an advanced utility billing software solution.
At Tridens, we combine the industry’s complete functional footprint with superior real-time architecture. Our software is future-ready; it supports any sector, service, or business.
Characteristics I should look for
Modern online billing systems include necessary features like payment tracking, integrated payment processing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc.
The required features list will vary depending on your company size, the industry, services, and dozens of other parameters.
It’s easy to get distracted by all the possibilities modern billing systems offer.
Before moving to functionalities, consider these key characteristics:
- simplicity: your software should simplify billing to avoid unnecessary complexity. For example, your finance department should be able to use the software without months of training.
- usability: this is the logical consequence of simplicity. Your software must ensure that it addresses all your needs and is easy to navigate.
- data security: security should be a top priority for any billing tool. So make sure that your software uses data encryption, multi-factor authentication, tools for fraud detection, backup, and others.
Key functionalities
Your unique requirements are crucial in determining the billing and revenue management software that will strive for operational efficiency and profitability. Our innovative future-ready monetization platform is perfect for high-volume consumption-based events for any service, industry, or business model.
Grow your annual recurring revenue streams with flexible, robust, and future-proof features! Let’s take a look at which core functionalities our billing it’s focusing on:
- customer management: Onboard and care for customers; see real-time balance and entitlement information.
- innovate billing & invoicing: managing flexible billing cycles (billing in advance, billing on the first usage) and sending attractive invoices out of the box (customized invoices, adjusting any balance, and managing payments)
- pricing: for optimizing the whole revenue potential, a sophisticated, cloud-based billing system gives the functionality to differentiate your offerings through flat-rate, consumption-based, or a hybrid approach
- usage-based rating: handling everything from simple flat-rate usage models to the more complex usage-based rating models (any measurable metric, track usage, and virtual goods in real-time or any combination in between)
- revenue management: tracking all the phases of revenue recognition (managing multi-level accounts, custom reports) – with ready-to-use reports and analytics, your accounting or finance teams can easily track the revenue
- payments, collections & dunning: collecting different types of income with easy-to-use billing software
The rise of automated billing system
If you are still invoicing manually, your business looks out of touch and behind the times. So, streamline your invoicing and payment flow and eliminate your billing and collection headaches with automated billing.
Automate the Order to Cash (O2C) or Quote to Cash (Q2C) process. In that case, automated billing software takes care of all the functions related to the billing process.
Consequently, it can generate quotes, offers, contracts, and invoices, collect payments, and handle approvals and provisioning with little manual input.
Your invoices will be accurate and on time. Accordingly, your customers will be delighted, and you will get your money faster without all the hassles. All this will result in an improvement to that all-important cash flow.
No matter what industry, an automated billing system can have several benefits. If you’re interested in that topic, please read the article about 5 reasons why your team should deploy automated billing.
In conclusion
The success of your revenue business relies on having the right billing system. A system meets your unique requirements and simplifies the complexities inherent to recurring revenue business models. Tridens provides cloud-based billing solutions for both your immediate and long-term goals. Learn more about Tridens’ billing software here, or schedule a free demo!
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