Billing is Key to Your SaaS Business Growth

When dreaming of SaaS growth, you might not think of your billing system immediately. In the search for growth, your marketing and customer success strategies are likely much closer to your heart. Still, as it turns out, Billing software is currently in a renaissance, and for good reasons. Here we will explain why billing is in the spotlight again, and why it might just be the key to improving your ARR, MRR, and CLV.

Hidden Complexity in SaaS Billing

In SaaS business and especially usage-based pricing, billing is more than just printing a regular invoice. SaaS-specific business issues need to be tackled.

Consumption pricing like pay-per-use requires insights and lots of data processing. Suddenly, your billing system needs to be flexible, accurate, and manage large volumes. And if that is not enough, it also needs to be adaptable, so that when new pricing models or new products and propositions come along, you can still bill it in the same system.

What Makes SaaS Billing so Difficult?

The billing system does the heavy lifting of your business in the background.

It is the gathering of data, the syncing with different internal and external systems, the continuous matching against contracts at any given point in time that is needed to provide that accurate usage invoice. And this at a large scale. A generic subscription fee is easy but rough. At the root, that line-level insight is needed to do billing exactly right.

Integration and Data Processing

Let’s have a look at the integration and data processing part. APIs need to be connected and the billing platform needs to orchestrate the data gathering. From there, the data needs to be matched to contract terms. There might have been pre-billed elements, overages in usage, price hikes, etc. All this should lead to a clean-cut, correct, and non-disputable bill. Your billing system needs to be silently working in the background.

Setting it Up the Right Way

Needless to say: having your billing right from the start is a pre-requisite for SaaS growth. The alternative is manual repair work, with lots of room for errors. It will lead to revenue leaks and slow cash flow, while your team is spending time trying to keep customers happy. A good SaaS billing system has 3 things:

1. Flexible contract management that can easily adapt your contracts and pricing
2. An extensive and solid API integration that allows for indefinite data flows
3. Ability to monitor SaaS metrics, performance, and growth plans in real-time.

Investing early in a good billing system will not just take a future headache away, but also give you those key insights into customer behavior that brings you further on your SaaS journey.

Watch a Video: How to manage your saas billing better

Take Us to the Test!

If you feel your billing needs will outgrow your current recurring revenue billing solution, or if you are just curious to learn how Good Sign does things differently, feel free to take us to the test! We will gladly take on your challenge and prove to you it can be done, and that the new world lies beyond just subscriptions.

Download a quick guide: How to Manage Customer Contracts in Recurring Billing With Good Sign