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Contract Management Is Core In Recurring Billing

Contract Management Is Core In Recurring Billing

Contracts Are often overlooked in subscription and recurring billing

contract management in recurring billing

Subscriptions promise simplicity. And that is why most subscription and recurring billing systems are focused on simplified B2C recurring models. However, companies in B2B recurring revenue need to go beyond simple subscription management to manage their customer contracts at a reasonable cost.

When You Are Stuck Between New Business Strategies and Old Legacy Contracts

New business models offer great opportunities. Moving to subscription and pay-per-use models has certainly picked up! And businesses are also evaluating and putting in place subscription and recurring billing software.

Flexibility and future-proof are always important when choosing business software.

Assuring software flexibility is even more important for a business, which already has a large base of existing customer contracts as a result of many years of business history. Existing contracts contain the evolution of offerings, pricing models, and customer-specific terms. Clients are happy with their deals, and the effort to re-negotiate does not usually pay off.

Most subscription and recurring billing software cover the fairly limited needs of the most recently launched subscriptions. But do they offer the flexibility needed for future-proof?

How about the flexibility needed for automating the pricing and billing of the legacy contract portfolio? 

If not, how do you put those square pegs in the round holes of your new subscription billing system?

Look At Your Billing Challenge With Your "Contract Lenses"

Increasing the effort in the actual billing processing is not where the solution lies. Billing is not a problem if the customer contract can be entered and managed in a "digital twin" form when the signatures are in place.

Start by asking yourself:
  • Do we have proper visibility into the contracts?
  • Are the contracts in a digital form and contain all relevant data elements required for accurate pricing and billing?
  • Are the contract terms visible to your billing system?
  • How much manual work is needed in the services management or finance department to find out what to invoice and when?
  • Are we able to manage the changes and evolution in contracts?

Whenever there is a need to improve the billing process or decrease the number of billing complaints, the contracts should be put in the spotlight!

Put The Contract In The Middle

By putting the contract in the middle, you can solve billing challenges easily.

Look at enterprise architecture in recurring business! Agile billing software contains contract lifecycle management and it sits in the middle, right between the CRM and the ERP solution.

What more, agile billing software does not handle contract lifecycle management as a standalone function. It can also tap from CRM and ERP systems to create a single source of (contract) truth for billing.

Rules Rule When It Comes To Contract Lifecycle

Contracts will change over time. Services get renewed, terminated, added, and adjusted. Your contract-to-cash process must capture these changes to produce accurate invoices and avoid revenue leakage.

Any pay-per-use model requires also capturing and rating of usage for each billing period over the lifecycle of the contract.

We at Good Sign provide agile billing software where contract lifecycle management is core and flexibility is guaranteed with a set of:

  • standard business rules for pricing and billing,
  • customizable pricing and billing rules,
  • period of validity for the rules, and
  • time-stamps for the transactions.

Kindness towards your dear old client contracts is secured and future-proof is guaranteed. 

Download A Quick Guide: How To Manage Customer Contracts with Good Sign:

 

Download conract management CTA

 

Take us to the test!

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. Let's get your business beyond just subscriptions.

Good Sign

Good Sign Software helps businesses solve existing pain points in monetizing service contracts and managing subscriptions and pay-per-use services. We help companies freely grow scalable services.

Feel free to contact us and let’s have a chat on how we can support your company.

 

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