Does Your Billing Process Still Include Spreadsheets and Manual Labor?

ARE COMPANIES STILL GATHERING BILLING DATA MANUALLY?

Today, even the most complex billing models can be digitalized and automated. However, there are many organizations and many industries that are only now starting to look for billing process automation.

Briefly, the current state: 

Automated Billing for Physical Goods

ERP systems and Web stores have long ago automated billing for physical products. From customer order to either order completion or deliver billing is triggered automatically.

Subscription Billing on the Rise 

Within the world of services, telecom companies have been the first to automate billing due to the digital nature of their services, and due to the high transaction volumes. Billing automation has enabled telecom companies very advanced pricing models compared to many other industries.

Automated subscription billing and cloud billing has become a norm in media and software industries among others.

There are however many industries that face disruption with new end-to-end digital business models. These could be based upon self-service, automated service provisioning and automated usage-based billing.

Billing Automation Lacking for Comprehensive Service Contracts

Service providers offering comprehensive contracts and outsourcing have not automated their billing. Current service provider system landscape typically consists of:

• CRM systems support customer communication.
• Operational Service Systems and Service Management Tools support service delivery and service desk.
• ERP/Finance systems support purchases and deliveries of physical goods as well bookkeeping, accounts receivables and accounts payable.

But typically service providers with a large service portfolio have no billing automation solution.

WHAT IS INTELLIGENT BILLING AUTOMATION?

Intelligent billing automation solution:

• enables current service business models and new XaaS and IoT business models
• enables subscription and usage based pricing
• describes customer’s service contract content and conditions
• connects pricing rules and service level agreements to real service consumption and availability from several sources
• converts that to accurate and precise billing data,
• combines and splits bills according to customer’s requirements on a detailed cost centers and cost driver level transparently, and
• drives accurate revenue recognition.

When a service provider has not implemented an intelligent billing automation solution to perform these necessary actions, spreadsheets are used for each step. And that process is slow, prone to inaccuracies and requires a lot of manual labor.

HOW ABOUT INTELLIGENT MONETIZATION? AND END-TO-END DIGITALIZATION?

Manual labor can be reduced even further when intelligent rule-based automation is applied to chargebacks, costs, provisions, partner clearing calculations and revenue recognition.

Finally, besides monetization, end-to-end business digitalization supports service management activities anywhere from customer self-service to fully automated service activation. Fast. Accurate. Transparent.

WHY ARE COMPANIES STILL GATHERING BILLING DATA MANUALLY?

Many companies are just not there yet. As the number of customers, transactions and contract complexities increase, manual billing is a symptom of a multitude of process and financial inefficiencies as well as hidden customer dissatisfaction.

The cure is digitalization. Seize the opportunities of the digital era and build competitive advantage.

Good Sign’s SaaS solution for Service Providers and Service Ecosystems offers intelligent

1) subscription and usage based recurring billing automation and revenue recognition

2) end-to-end service business digitalization from customer self-service to service activation to monetization.