Is Excel, the world's most commonly used billing tool, the best?

Do you regularly spend last couple of days of every month diligently collecting data and preparing billing materials in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets? You are not the only one. This is true especially in service billing and happens not only in small companies but also in big corporations. There is nothing wrong with Excel. It is really very flexible, fast and efficient in data filtering and calculations.

Is the right conclusion then, that existing Sales, Service Management and Finance solutions are not flexible enough?

Let's look at average environments for service billing:

• ERP or sales systems are more capable in sales, delivery and billing of physical products than for services.
• Finance systems are used for invoice delivery or print routing to customer and by nature only have quite basic possibilities to define products, pricing conditions and invoice layout structures.
• Devices and service items are the same for all customers but sold differently what comes to scope and pricing conditions - "only" the name is the same.
• Asset management systems may be several for different type of assets or functions.
• Contracts are available only as office documents.
• Service managers collect data from different sources and use Excel to calculate chargeable values and prepare attachments for the customer.
• Data is either uploaded from Excel or captured manually into billing system (Finance system).

 And in the meanwhile, the environment is getting even more demanding for service billing:

• Services are growingly capacity based and priced with pay-per-use models with shortening time intervals, which is getting harder and harder to manage with Excel.
• Customer are growingly asking to split bills according to their cost centers, which is achieved by  organizing data in Excel.

This is not efficient due to manual efforts needed. But is that the only evil the company will suffer?

Here are 5 things that you could achieve with an intelligent billing platform ( % from a customer case example)

1. Eliminated manual work (90%)
2. Faster billing (98%)
3. Improved cash flow (70%)
4. Higher revenues (10%)
5. Less reclamations (50%)

You may wonder how billing automation will increase revenues. Basically for two reasons 1) data is wrong or missing resulting in missing revenue and 2) when volumes are taken once a month you never bill all used volumes.

Last but not least: the worst thing is that it is very difficult to develop new pricing models, new type of services and totally new business models based on Excels. Although probably easier than without!

Why this is important? Digitalization is shaping the business environment towards services. It means the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities by adding services to traditional products.

Billing is more and more service billing in the future. Business models will cover not only one company but the whole ecosystem and billing between different parties.

This transition is going on. New solutions and technologies are developed to support service businesses and digitalization of things. Even if your company is not transferring to new business you can benefit from these solutions and platforms. Instead of Excel you can today have billing system that collects data from different sources and provices functionality to define complex and customer based pricing conditions and enable customised invoicing loyout structures for customer requirements.

Do you feel that Excel will not be enough for your company's future? See a real life example on how automating billing can improve business.