If your business is growing, so is your offering of products and services, in all likelihood. You may well be re-evaluating your billing system to provide better support to your increasing customer base. Generally, the first question people ask themselves in this situation is, what’s the solution, cloud-based or on-premises?
At Tridens, we believe that cloud-based solutions are the best fit for most businesses in maintaining a competitive edge in a customer-focused and fluid market.
Read on, and let us explain our reasons behind this belief.
Set-up
We’ll start at the same place you are going to start with your new system, the set-up. With a cloud-based billing solution, the software is hosted and owned by the software vendor, and you access it via a web browser. So there is no actual set-up as such. You don’t own the system, so you are not responsible for maintaining or upgrading it.
On-premises solutions are purchased as complete systems that need to be installed onto your work computers and servers. As you own the system, you need to maintain and upgrade it.
The most significant issue with using an on-premises system is the cost involved in scaling up to support your business’ growth. This scaling could require an increased number of servers, and the money, time, effort, and possibly additional space that involves. You have none of these issues with a cloud-based system, apart from an increase in your usage-based subscription, perhaps.
Flexibility
With either of these billing system types you choose, you will opt for a solution that will support your needs at that time. However, only a cloud-based system is designed for change. If you want to make modifications to an on-premises system, you will have to call upon a billing expert. Changes to on-premises systems will cost money, of course, but it will also take time. The time you lose in making the changes you need could lead to a delay in launching a new product, or missed opportunities in s rapidly changing market.
Cloud-based systems are designed to make changes quickly, as your business expands. Changes can be configured easily and do not require a technical expert to carry them out. A cloud-based system provides you with the agility (agile billing) you need to track customer trends, respond to their changing needs, and capitalize on new customer opportunities.
Growth
The majority of businesses want to grow, that seems obvious. Elastic scalability is a built-in feature of a cloud-based billing system. While on-premises systems require you to intervene to deal with expansion (perhaps by buying and installing new servers), a cloud-based system comes with this elasticity.
Elasticity allows you to expand your cloud-based system temporarily. You may want to grow only for a short period to cover seasonal variations in trade, for instance. With an on-premises system, you will purchase what you need for the expansion, and you keep it even if your market contracts.
With a cloud-based system, you can have the optimal amount of capacity all of the time, adjusting it easily according to your needs. There is no restriction on your growth, and you are not wasting resources on the capacity you no longer need.
If your business is growing in international markets, these advantages become even more apparent. Scaling up your operations internationally with on-premises systems may involve installing servers in new locations. Cloud-based solutions don’t suffer any such issue. Adding international capacity to your cloud-based billing system is a seamless process. It will allow you to easily take care of the complexities of international currencies, taxes, and payment methods.
Integration
Integrating your billing system into your current operations is critical. All of your systems need to work well together to provide the best experience possible for your customers. On-premises systems tend to integrate well with other systems using the same platform, but not so well with others. This situation means manual data transfer is often needed between systems, costing time and money.
On the other hand, cloud-based systems are designed to work in harmony with your other systems, such as CRM, ERP, CPQ, tax gateways, payment gateways, etc. This smooth operation allows seamless and automated data transfer between the systems.
Conclusion
Cloud-based billing systems offer the best solution in terms of set-up, agility, integration, and growth. Tridens Monetization’s cloud-based billing solution is powered by Amazon Web Services and can help your business streamline its operations, launch new products quickly, and manage rapid growth. On AWS you may find the billing solution by clicking here.
We invite you to get in touch with Tridens Monetization today and arrange your personalized demonstration of our intelligent billing platform.
