We recently had a great conversation with Igor Stenmark, the billing expert at MGI Research, and discussed the role of billing in a modern ICT environment. One thing became immediately clear: billing solutions nowadays need to be agile to adapt quickly to business changes, and therefore deserve their place in the ICT infrastructure. Read about Igor’s reasoning below.
Modern organizations look beyond traditional monolithic ERP solutions and reap the benefits of easy integration. Since the introduction of the quote-to-cash, and later CPQ, there have been functional flows that overlap traditional CRM, ERP, and payment solutions.
On top of that, ERP solutions are typically not equipped to deliver billing at a granular precision that is needed to quickly adapt to change. An Agile Billing Platform, where all elements are interconnected using microservices, overcomes a monolithic approach and supports your functional architecture, making it more effective and flexible.
With new billing and monetization concepts, the need to integrate billing microservices and data increases.
For example, both billing and CPQ handle price books and product catalogs. This is a duplication prone to errors that can easily be integrated.
Another example is converged billing, where a variety of charges from various accounts that a customer might have, are combined. Currently, a lot of companies are looking into this field to support their clients.
According to Igor, 30-50% of the service inquiries are related to billing, which makes being able to present billing data a big deal. Offering self-service portals is a great start, but it all depends on your ability to derive the billing data.
Agile systems such as Good Sign allow for monitoring cumulative billable revenue throughout the billing period by capturing billing events continuously. This way, you get insights into the revenue gap to close with full transparency, also in pay-per-use billing.
If you decide to look at an Agile Billing solution, here are the tips Igor provides to his clients:
Watch an on-demand webinar, where aspects of agile billing, subscription, and recurring revenue business transformation are discussed in a compact 15-minute session. Speakers are Igor Stenmark of MGI Research and Taija Engman of Good Sign.
Marc Wullings : Jun 22, 2021 9:35:39 AM
Billing Really Is Part Of Your Customer Process Over the past 10 years, the CX landscape has changed dramatically. Where older CRM systems handed...
Taija Engman : Jun 30, 2021 10:00:00 AM
Yes, you want recurring billing, but your ERP and legacy systems do not provide the pricing and rating flexibility to cater for subscriptions and...
Petri Takala : Aug 9, 2022 9:15:00 AM
Billing should be a natural and positive event in business. A financial “thank you” after a job well done. But too often, the invoice or the billing...
