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Salesforce Billing is a comprehensive billing platform that allows businesses to manage and invoice their customers for one-time, recurring, and usage-based products. The platform integrates with other Salesforce solutions such as CRMs, ERPs, and CPQs, making it a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. The platform helps businesses by easily keeping track of customer balances and issuing invoices. It also manages payments and finances, making it a one-stop shop for all billing needs. Salesforce billing is an excellent solution for businesses that want to streamline their billing process and improve communication with their customers.
Billing Solutions and Advantages
Billing solutions like the Salesforce Billing Platform provide a complete and easy way to bill your customers. Such solutions allow you to configure your product catalogs and prices. You can set up different combinations of one-time fees, recurring fees, and even usage-based billing. Once you onboard customers to your billing platform and assign them their plans, billing solutions keep track of their billing cycles and subscription policies. When a billing cycle changes, billing solutions can help you send invoices to your customers. They can also store payments or automate the payment process through different integrations. Of course, generating invoices or bills is the primary function of a billing solution. But these things go hand in hand with subscription management, revenue management, and financial reporting. And most importantly, being able to quickly change or update what you are offering to your customers.
Imagine your company is providing multiple different services based on different billing cycles. Services such as Telco or IoT typically come in different packages with diverse pricing, where each package offers something useful to the customer. You can customize your subscription to include things that you provide for free. It is called additional resources. For example, you could add minutes of voice calls to the silver package and data for the gold package. Additionally, on top of these base services, there are many addons available that your customer can choose to add to their subscription fees. Some customers may choose a prepaid instead of a postpaid plan, which adds an entirely new dimension to how their payment cycles are managed. Modern billing solutions are designed to help you with your billing and revenue management requirements and provide a way for you to manage and organize your business.
Salesforce Billing and What it Does
Salesforce Billing is a neat solution that automates the invoicing process and allows businesses to accept and allocate payments. The Salesforce Billing module allows businesses to establish recurring relationships by handling all revenue types, changes, and addons while also managing client data for financial processes. In addition to subscription billing, the Salesforce Billing System also supports rating and billing customers based on usage by determining the correct price per unit. Clients may simplify their product list by using complete configuration while still being able to customize pricing, tax rules, and revenue recognition at the product level. By supporting different billing frequencies, each customer can have an invoice automatically issued for different periods.
Invoice Consolidation and Split Invoicing is a feature that allows you to combine, split, or consolidate multiple invoices for an order. This guarantees that the customer is fairly and effectively charged based on their contract details. With information necessary for various revenue recognition standards, revenue plans can also be established. Multiple analytics options allow Salesforce users to get insight on how their customers are using the services, how much they spend, how much revenue they result in, and more. Through integration with Salesforce CPQ, the full quote to cash process is covered. Salesforce CPQ and Billing work together to allow their users to easily configure quotes for potential leads, then convert them into customers and begin billing them. The Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tool is a time-saving solution that allows your salespeople to cut quote-to-cash times in half. Read more about Salesforce CPQ in one of our articles.
Quote to Cash Automation
- Integration of Billing Solutions with CPQ, CRM, ERP, Payments, etc.
- Begin talking about how we did it ourselves with Tridens Monetization
When we talk about a quote to cash automation, we refer to the automation of the complete end-to-end process of selling your services. In this case, billing solutions represent just one of the components working together to help you automate the whole process. CPQ billing is the first step, where your sales representatives use CPQ (Configure Price Quote) tools to prepare complex pricing quotes for potential leads. Once a lead is converted to a customer, the billing system takes over, which works hand in hand with CRM and ERP solutions to manage customer relationships and enterprise resource planning. Billing solutions, such as Salesforce Billing, include payment importing alternatives or integrations with payment service providers that let you automate money collection.
Of course, we are just scratching the surface because numerous additional functionalities need to be ensured to achieve automation. A billing system on its own needs to handle Notifications both to the business team and to the customers. Sending emails to your users is a great way to keep them informed if a new invoice has been issued, if a payment is to be collected, or if they are running behind with their payments. For overdue payments, many billing solutions incorporate a dunning component that tries to retrieve the customers’ overdue payments. The system becomes self-sustainable when combined with a customer care portal that allows your customers to log in and manage their accounts, as well as contact representatives.
Salesforce Billing Alternative
Salesforce Billing offers a complete solution, but for some companies, sometimes this platform is not enough to satisfy all the needs of every industry. That is why, in addition to the traditional offering you may have been using, you always need an alternative, such as our billing solution built by Tridens. Tridens Monetization is a real-time convergent charging and monetization platform. Due to its high customization, Tridens Monetization is designed to be used for any industry and supports any revenue stream with any business model.
Users can develop unique offers and discounts, then combine them into subscription packages. Similar to Salesforce subscription billing, Tridens Monetization is also highly flexible, allowing for dynamically configurable billing cycles and recurring product cycles, from daily to annually. Our metered billing component takes usage rating to a new level by allowing our users to configure their zoning hierarchies, services, and rate plans with different pricing parameters. Automated configurable jobs ensure that all of the billing cycles are moved and that invoices are generated. Tridens Monetization also helps in revenue management and collection activities.
Tridens Monetization’s integration with other systems allows our clients to automate their quote to cash procedure using APIs. Our billing solution can integrate with CRM solutions and ERP solutions, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and Netsuite. Tridens Monetization is linked to Avalara, a tax calculation service provider, for complicated taxation issues, particularly in the United States market. We are also connected with prominent payment service providers like Stripe and Braintree to allow our customers to make payments automatically. Finally, regarding the CPQ software, we implemented a bi-directional integration with Salesforce CRM. This allows our users to use Salesforce for finding leads, creating opportunities, configuring quotes, and converting them to customers, which are then onboarded to Tridens Monetization.
Conclusion
Billing platforms are becoming more important for businesses of all sizes. When your orders move from simple purchases to recurring charges or usage-based ratings, and when your company’s policies introduce intricate pricing and discounting formulas, you’ll begin searching for a system to assist you in managing it. If you are looking for a solution that will cover your billing needs and be able to support your entire sales process, but the Salesforce Billing platform is not enough, we suggest you take a look at Tridens Monetization. Feel free to contact us, and our team will be happy to answer your questions or schedule a demo. Provide us with your needs, and we’ll find the most effective approach to get you started in Tridens Monetization.
