What is enterprise billing?
Enterprise billing is a sophisticated system made to handle large businesses’ complicated (and often nuanced) needs when it comes to billing, managing subscriptions, and handling payments. It includes automated, unified tools that make billing for many goods and services across channels easy, accurate, and quick.
Large companies usually offer complicated pricing plans for multi-tiered solutions, which can be hard to manage regarding data and compliance. Enterprise billing solutions let you handle a lot of data and activities on a single platform because they are sophisticated and scalable.
Synonyms
- Enterprise subscription billing
- Enterprise billing management
- Enterprise billing software
- SaaS billing
- Subscription-based enterprise billing
The Problems That Enterprise Companies Face With Billing
The processes of enterprise billing are more complicated than those of traditional billing. Because their billing systems are so complicated, business companies often face several problems, such as:
- Billing systems that don’t work well. Enterprise businesses have a lot of different needs, and manual billing methods and old systems can’t meet them all. This makes billing cycles slow and inefficient.
- A complicated way of running the business. Large companies often have many departments, sections, and subsidiaries, and each has its own billing needs. This makes it hard to track and combine payment data across the company.
- There were a lot of transactions. Because of their size and spread, enterprise companies usually handle many transactions, making their billing processes more complicated.
- There are different ways to set prices. Businesses have large catalogs of products with a wide range of prices, making calculating and correctly managing invoices harder.
- Billing is wrong. In complicated billing systems, math mistakes can cause bills to be sent to the wrong people, which could lead to customers leaving, unhappy customers, or lost income.
- Trouble with paying taxes. Global tax rules, like having to file multiple taxes, keep track of exemptions, and figure out VAT, make the process of corporate billing even more difficult.
Business Billing Software vs. Standard Billing Software
The most crucial difference between corporate billing and legacy solutions is their architecture and features’ complexity. Standard billing software can handle one-time purchases, but it’s not flexible enough to handle subscriptions, custom pricing systems, and more than one currency.
Basic Software for Billing
Traditional billing software handles transactions for a single purchase and has basic features for billing, processing payments, and making financial reports. However, it doesn’t have the advanced tools and flexibility to handle more complicated billing situations.
Some of the biggest problems are that it doesn’t support ongoing subscription billing or recurring payments and only supports manual product configuration and basic price tiers.
- Can’t handle custom pricing models or tiered pricing structures
- Doesn’t support multiple currencies or comply with global tax laws
- Customer account management is inefficient
- It’s hard to scale and connect to other systems
- Few custom automation and processes are available
Business billing software
Businesses can easily handle tiered pricing, subscriptions, and other modern billing issues with enterprise billing systems with complex designs and powerful features.
Unlike a regular billing system, business software can handle consumption, usage-based billing, dynamic billing, and other billing models that must be constantly tracked and data collected.
Features of business billing software
At the corporate level, billing features include automated processes, customization without writing code, rules, templates that can be used repeatedly, analytics tools, and support for operations in multiple countries. The following are some of the things that business software can do:
- Robust tools for managing invoices and revenue
- Enterprise billing based on subscriptions
- Audit trail and detailed financial reporting
- Tools for compliance with global taxes, VAT, derogations, ASC 606, IFRS 15, SOC II, and more
- Automation of revenue recognition
- A wide range of billing and payment choices
It has automated customer account management, contract renewal workflows, dunning management, website integration for self-service portals, region-specific campaigns in any language or currency, and tracking of customers for usage- and consumption-based models. It also works with other systems like ERP, CRM, bookkeeping, and CPQ.
Enterprise billing software’s pros and cons
Pricing models that are hard to understand
The best thing about corporate billing software is that it is flexible—it can be easily changed to fit the needs of any business and can be programmed to handle any billing task.
This includes:
- Product bundles that can be customized
- Microservices and multi-tiered pricing
- Payment plans that change based on how much a customer uses them
- Billing that happens immediately for ongoing subscription services
- Updates and changes to payment plans • Billing schedules that can be changed
Most importantly, corporate billing engines automatically take care of these tasks, so you don’t have to. The platform does the math, makes the document, and sends it instantly when it’s time to bill a client or set up a new configuration.
Rises in Efficiency from Quote to Cash
From getting a request from a customer to getting paid, everything that happens in between is part of the quote-to-cash process. As a business grows, it needs to improve its billing processes to make going from quotes to cash more efficient.
To make quote-to-cash cycles go faster, enterprise billing solutions automate routine jobs and combine multiple processes into one platform.
Let’s say a business-to-business (B2B) company gets an order for 500 units of its goods. If they did it by hand, they would have to make the statement and ensure the order was correct before processing the payment.
The software handles all the billing for an entire business, including getting up-to-date product information from ERP, setting prices automatically, and accepting payments in one place.
Improves Customer Happiness
The message is apparent during the buying and purchasing processes: a smooth sales experience doesn’t include a person. A report from NICE in 2022 called the 2022 Digital-First Customer Experience Report says that 81% of customers want more self-service choices.
Enterprise software that automates bills, ordering, and account management helps businesses put their buyers in charge, which saves them time and money and makes customers happier.
Has Offers More advanced analytics
Businesses can find new ways to save money and improve their cash flow as they learn more about how they bill.
Reporting and analytics tools on enterprise billing platforms monitor customer trends and income patterns to find more ways to grow.
Advanced metrics like average time-to-payment, invoice disputes, and net income realization rates tell us a lot about how well a business is doing and how healthy its finances are.
Offers protection for data
Data security is a big issue for most customers and one of the main reasons businesses get fined for not following the rules.
Advanced encryption and authentication technology in enterprise billing systems keeps customer data safe while meeting the strictest data privacy standards and legal requirements.
Integrations for business billing
Corporate Resource Planning (ERP): With modules for finance, HR, marketing, inventory management, and order management all built-in, enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms give companies a clear picture of their whole business.
Billing systems connect to ERP platforms so users can see information about customers, products, configurations, availability, price levels, taxes, and fees in real time.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Software for customer relationship management (CRM) gives you a complete picture of your customers’ profiles and actions across all your marketing, sales, and customer service departments.
By connecting CRM to enterprise billing systems, businesses can get the most up-to-date information on their customers, which helps them provide better service and keep them coming back. It also lets companies see more about how customers act and what they buy.
