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Automated Billing
Automated Billing- Any business interested in growth needs to automate. In today’s connected world, digital workflows and machine learning are streamlining business and transactional processes, making them more efficient and taking humans out of the equation so they can focus on more productive tasks. We have automated sales, supply chain, factory assembly lines and even delivery. However, many companies have been lax in automating financial processes such as billing. Without automated billing, you often cannot optimize sustained business growth.
Maintaining timely and accurate billing is essential to managing cash flow, but automated billing is more than just generating invoices. It starts with assuring your billing system has all billing-related data inputs, often from disparate sources. This often-overlooked, mission-critical activity is called normalizing the data or “mediation” and is critical to prevent revenue leakage. After mediation, the process extends to payments, revenue recognition, collections, agreement management, reporting and much more. To create a foundation for billing systems to promote growth, companies have to integrate with other business processes. Automation gives you the business agility you need so you can configure new revenue models rather than having to write more code.
Why Billing Automation Matters
A combination of one-time purchases, subscriptions and usage-based consumption pricing is critical to driving digital growth. You cannot support that combination of pricing models and maintain a positive customer experience without accurate and timely automated billing in a timely and consistent way that makes the cash influx more predictable.
By automating financials, it also becomes easier to experiment with new business and pricing models. Research from Manifesto Growth Architects shows that 70% of businesses see membership and subscription models as the future to further commercial growth. With the right automated systems in place, it’s relatively easy to change service models and pricing to fine-tune and test new business ideas that drive growth.
As COVID-19 has shown us, hosted services also make it easier to automate and scale operations in times of crisis. Cloud platforms can handle expanding transaction volumes and readily adapt to changing workloads brought on by different billing models. They also make it easier to aggregate data for analytics.
