Pricing and Billing Automation - 10 Benefits Explained Shortly

Last week we published a blog post: “10 Reasons You Should Invest in Flexible Pricing and Billing”. I thought to continue about that, by explaining the reasons in some depth and give grounds for the benefits that come along after automating a flexible pricing and billing process.

These reasonings fit to a modern recurring revenue monetization software - a system that is more than a mere ERP suite or a plain subscription billing system.

10 Benefits of Flexible Pricing and Billing Automation Explained Shortly

1. Revenue leakage stops

Most service businesses run a revenue leakage of 5-10%. That is usually due to one or more of the following reasons:

• Subscribed services are provisioned manually, and thus data about activated services is missing or lacks behind in billing process
• Pay-per-use service data is not captured automatically or it is captured too infrequently to enforce invoicing of all billable use
• Service data is combined manually in invoice processing, and mistakes occur
• Customer contract content is not stored digitally and thus price drivers cannot be tracked and enforced automatically.

When using a recurring revenue software, customer contract content is stored digitally, service usage data is connected, and digital rules control charging. Revenue leakage stops.

So, monetization software brings a great ROI with 5-10% more to top line.

2. Cashflow accelerates

Monetization automation can easily accelerate service business cash flow by 15-30 days for fixed and pay-per-use services invoiced in arrears.

Capability to easily invoice and keep deferred revenue accounting up to date automatically  enables, for example, billing fixed subscription revenue 12 months in advance.

3. Less manual work costs

Yesterday's system architecture may cause intense manual work load in for example:

• Collecting service usage data
• Verifying billable items and pricing
• Combining or splitting invoices as required by the customers
• Billing quality assurance, and
• Entering billing and accounting data to systems

Monetization automation software typically eliminates 10-15 FTE manual cost per 100M of annual revenue when applied to businesses with large service contracts.

4. Less people dependency and 5. Less human mistakes 

When contract content, price information and service usage data are disconnected, accurate customer invoicing is dependent on specific people who know each customer contract well.

Often also professional services work booking is highly dependent on specialists guessing what items are billable and what categories should be used to bill each customer. 

Some data is often missing and even the best of people make human errors.

6. Short time to market

Time to market is short when introduction of a new business model, a new service or a new pricing model is enabled by

• Describing a new service
• Tweaking the digitalized business rules related to pricing, billing and monetization
• Adjusting the usage data capture

This may take just minutes. Instead of the days or weeks of coding often required in existing systems!  

7. Single source of truth and 8. improved transparency

When service data is automatically priced right and brought transparently to invoice, the service provider and the customer have a single source of truth for the services provided and the fees. 

9. Increased customer satisfaction

Customer dissatisfaction with billing is today a major burden to customer satisfaction.

If service offering and service contracts contain any complexity or variability, automation is almost the only way to assure quality invoicing.

Our customers usually see a significant rise in customer's satisfaction to invoices after implementing billing automation.

10. More satisfied employees

Modern pricing, billing and monetization software frees employees from repetitive manual invoicing and quality assurance every month. Also, it is great for employees too, when customers are satisfied with accurate invoices.

We believe, that the world will be a better place when businesses can freely grow scalable services. If you are interested in hearing more, let’s schedule a call. You can also check how our customers were able to launch new services to market faster.

All service businesses should consider: Are we offering our customers the services they want? Do we satisfy changing customer needs fast enough with new service offerings? Is our pricing model competitive and optimal? Is our billing process up to par? If not, it is never too early to start automation.