Over the many years we at Good Sign have been working with hundreds of billing professionals to improve their service billing, and from these interactions, we learned the 5 most common pain points people have to deal with in their service billing. Here you can find them, as well as the solutions so that you can act upon them yourself in your company.
Revenue leakage is the most common problem in service billing. It is those service items that you actually performed but you cannot charge for due to various reasons. Those reasons could well be that service items were not rightfully registered or are not matching your contract. Or, - as we see in many cases – they are simply omitted on the bill because the work was not visible to the billing administrator when the bill was created. Not being able to bill those services creates a revenue leakage of 10 % and eventually, you might be looking at 30 % of loss in profit. All the more reason to fix those leakages in your service billing system!
To capture all billing items correctly, start at the root of the problem: ensure your billing system can cover all billing items from day one.
A sure sign of problems in your service billing system is a lot of manual work, typically done in Excel spreadsheets, to find, retract, and store billable items in your billing system. Of course, this manual work is costly and leaves a lot of room for errors. But it also slows down your billing process every single month. As the invoices are sent out later, the payment will also be delayed. Moreover, error-prone invoices will require lots of back-and-forth with your client which will also delay the payments and keep your staff busy with the previous billing cycle. The bill might be unclear, or they might be wrongly billed. But either way, it leaves you with more work to explain or correct the invoice.
An agile billing system can cover all billing rules your business needs and eliminates all manual work.
It might be difficult to roll out, plan, and execute these kind of new services. New business initiatives are not possible to implement in the current billing environment. Because of the billing system, the new service roll-out is put on hold or no longer pursued.
Often, the monetization is not taken into account when new services are developed. Make it part of the solution, by adapting to an agile billing platform that can easily be configured for the new offering.
It will take your team longer to find all the line items needed to complete the invoice. Or, they might miss a few, leading to revenue leakage. You cannot provide a full trace to service entitlements and events each invoice line contains. Clients will complain, you will need to dig data, correct, send credit notes, rebill…. At the end of the day, your bills will be paid later, and clients are dissatisfied.
The invoice is a moment of truth in the client relationship. A clear, lovable bill creates confidence and trust. Make sure the client can recognize the line items on the bill and bill with a sufficient level of detail. It will propel your business forward.
If your billing data needs to be gathered from all kinds of different places, even your auditor will have as much trouble deriving the needed data that compile the billing events as you. And your customers are left crying for traceability and a single source of truth. There will be questions about the source and the correctness of the data, and you will run into questions from stakeholders as to whether your billing data is correct and verifiable.
A good agile billing system helps you plan and gives you a grip on the business as well as a timestamped and auditable billing events system.
How can you get your new business demands covered without having to do a major IT system overhaul? By adopting a future-proof agile billing system, that -no matter what happens- can cope with the business models you apply to meet your future demand from your clients. Sounds complex? That is what Good Sign has been doing since it was founded, helping clients deal with billing challenges easily and comfortably. As a result, we now have one of the most agile billing offers on the market.
If you feel your billing needs will outgrow your current 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 is enter than you might think.
Feel free to contact us and let’s have a chat on how we can support your company.
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