Salesforce Billing and other billing solutions make our life easier when keeping track of the customer’s balances and issuing invoices. When you are charging for one-time fees, recurring fees, or usage-based products on a more extensive customer base, things could quickly get out of hand if you don’t have a capable billing solution. Salesforce Billing helps you keep everything in place and gives you an overview of what’s going on with your customers and revenue. Solutions like Salesforce Billing also manage your payments and finances and integrate with other solutions like CRMs, ERPs, and CPQ tools, which work to fulfill the entire process, from finding leads, to receiving payments recognizing revenue.
Billing Solutions and Advantages
Billing solutions like the Salesforce Billing Platform provide a comprehensive 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. Once a billing cycle shifts, billing solutions can generate invoices for your customers, and even keep track of payments, or automate the payment process through different integrations. Of course, generating invoices or bills is the primary function of a billing solution, but this goes hand in hand with subscription management, revenue management, 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. As you design your Silver, Gold, or Platinum subscriptions, you would also like to provide additional resources to your customers, such as free megabytes of data or free minutes of voice calls. 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 also opt for a prepaid instead of a postpaid model, which adds an entirely new perspective on how their billing cycles are handled. Modern billing solutions are designed to help you with your billing 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 will enable enterprises to build recurring relationships by handling all revenue types, amendments, and addons while managing customer 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 can simplify their product catalog through comprehensive configuration while still being able to set up 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 allows multiple invoices per order, to ensure that customer is accurately and efficiently billed based on their contract details. Additionally, revenue schedules can be created with details required for different revenue recognition standards. 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 convenient solution that reduces quote-to-cash times and allows your sales representatives to speed up their quoting preparations up to ten times. 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, like Salesforce Billing, also come with payment importing options or integrations with payment service providers, which allow you to automate payment collections.
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. Combined with a customer self-care portal where your customers can log in and manage their accounts and talk to your representatives, the system becomes self-sustainable.
Tridens Monetization: An All-Round Solution
We developed our billing solution at Tridens. Tridens Monetization, as we named it, is a real-time convergent charging and Monetization platform. Due to its high configurability, Tridens Monetization is designed to be used for any industry and supports any revenue stream with any business model. Our users can create innovative offerings and discounts, then bundle them together and build subscription plans. 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 take care that all the billing cycles are shifted and that invoices are generated. Tridens Monetization also helps you with revenue management and performing collections.
Tridens Monetization also allows our clients to automate their quote to cash process through integrations with other systems. Monetization can integrate with CRM solutions and ERP solutions, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and Netsuite. For complex taxation purposes, especially in the U.S. market, Monetization is integrated with Avalara, a tax calculation service provider. Additionally, we are also integrated with major payment service providers like Stripe and Braintree to enable payment automation for our clients. Finally, regarding the CPQ software, we implemented a bi-directional integration with Salesforce CRM, which 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 a necessity for more and more companies. As soon as your orders are upgraded from simple purchases to recurring fees or usage-based rating, and as soon as your business policies introduce complex pricing and discounting rules, you will start looking for a platform to help you manage that. If you are looking for a solution that will cover your billing needs and be able to support your entire sales process, 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 requirements, and we will find the optimal way to get you started in Tridens Monetization.
