Did you know that 67% of businesses use automation to standardize or automate daily tasks? If this is the case, why do nearly 95% of workers say they still perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks? While organizations automate many processes, they often overlook billing as an element of their digital transformation. But understanding what an automated billing system is and its importance is crucial for customer satisfaction and staying ahead of competitors.
What is an Automated Billing System?
An automated billing system enables you to streamline and automate routine, but often complex and time-consuming billing functions. These functions can include billing, invoicing, payment processing, provisioning, dunning, revenue management, customer-event triggers, and more. An automated billing system aims to save time and money by gathering data from multiple systems onto a single platform. Then it creates accurate invoices, ensures timely delivery, and receives payments on time.
Not all automated billing systems are the same. Make sure the system you use is suitable for your business and its specific processes. To help you choose the right one, let’s look at five common billing-related challenges. Then we’ll cover how the right automated billing system can lessen (and even eliminate) these issues.
Choose the Right Automated Billing System
“Just surviving” in today’s fast-paced digital world is no longer enough, you need to thrive. To avoid hindering cash flow, make sure you’re not spending endless cycles on billing processes. Look at the following billing challenges, and ask yourself – Have these become a recurring problem for my organization?
Challenge 1:
My system doesn’t provide the flexibility to support today’s ever-changing business and customer needs.
An agile billing system can easily adapt to solve both today’s business problems, as well as the uncertainties of tomorrow. Automated billing systems easily adapt to market and customer changes, solving the common issue of rigid systems. They offer point and click configurability for quick adjustments.
These systems have built-in business process workflow capabilities. These enable you to easily automate any process and configure tailored workflows based on any element within the platform.
Make sure the automated billing system you choose allows you to:
- Create custom rules so you can streamline all billing activities, from usage and mediation to collections
- Send invoices based on customer-centric cycles and settings
- Process payments in real time
- Track late payments and alert delinquent customers
- Implement automated retry logic for expired credit/debit cards
- Set up automatic notifications for declined credit/debit cards
- Create workflows for time-sensitive triggers and automatically generate critical reports
- Generate accurate financial reports and push insights directly to dashboards
Challenge 2:
My finance team needs to access multiple systems and manually report revenue, putting us at risk of regional and international noncompliance.
Overcome the challenge with an automated revenue management system that is fully configurable. Staying compliant quickly becomes unmanageable using manual processes or legacy billing systems that require extensive coding. Intelligent revenue recognition software enables you to streamline revenue management to allocate, reconcile, monitor, and recognize revenue. That goes for any pricing model, billing approach, or promotional offer – while staying compliant with ASC 606 and IFRS 15.
Challenge 3:
Keeping up with changing accounting and security compliance standards is taking a bite out of our profitability.
Use an automated billing system to align your billing processes with global regulatory standards and country–specific laws. The regulatory landscape changes frequently. If you’re using an out-of-the-box billing solution or manual billing processes, you risk becoming non-compliant.
To stay in sync with ongoing domestic and international security and compliance standards changes, you need an automated billing system. One that enables you to quickly and effortlessly reconfigure billing processes and security protocols.
To minimize regulatory risks, the automated billing system needs to provide the ability to:
- Encrypt confidential data
- Securely collect, store, and handle financial information – without the need for considerable IT involvement
- Control user access and provide the ability to quickly make user access changes
- Rapidly reconfigure billing processes and security protocols
Challenge 4:
Revenue leakage is draining my profitability.
Overcoming the challenge by reducing collection cycles and improving cash flow. If you’re battling revenue leakage, you’re not alone. According to Ernst and Young, approximately 42% of companies experience revenue leakage. Companies lose 1% – 5% of EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization) from poor payment follow-up processes and contract management.
An automated billing system streamlines collections processes, so you’ll minimize revenue loss and collection cycles while improving cash flow. The right automated collections and debt management system combines billing, dunning, collections, and payment processing in a single solution. It enables businesses to reduce days sales outstanding (DSO), improve cash flow, and enhance customer relationships.
Challenge 5:
Customer churn is on the rise.
Overcoming churn by eliminating invoicing errors and empowering customers to serve themselves. Let’s face it, no one looks forward to receiving a bill. If the invoice contains mistakes and overcharges, then the customer loyalty you’re trying to build begins eroding.
You may not realize, but billing is the most frequent communication you have with your customers. This is why it’s so important to deliver exceptional experiences – every time.
With billing models getting more complex, it’s crucial that your automated billing system is flexible and efficient. It needs to seamlessly track charges, deliver accurate invoices, and provide customers with safe and easy access for making payments. From pricing models through invoices to taxation, a flexible and automated billing management system maximizes revenue and improves the customer experience.
When catering to the needs of a diverse customer base, an automated billing system is a must have. However, just like no two customers are alike, no two automated billing solutions are the same.
The right automated billing system supports ever-changing business and customer needs. It reduces or eliminates error-prone manual effort, protects data, adhere to compliance and security standards, plugs revenue leakage gaps, and delivers an exceptional customer experience. And there are even more reasons to automate tour enterprise billing system you may not have thought of.
Automate Your Billing Processes Today
Manually handling invoicing, payments, credits and refunds, outstanding balances, collections, and revenue recognition is inefficient. It’s error-prone and can result in cash flow bottlenecks.
The need to overcome these challenges is driving companies to demand more flexibility from their automated billing systems. At BillingPlatform, our cloud-based billing solution easily adapts to support all of your business requirements. That includes any product, service, and business model – so you have the insights needed to run your business more efficiently, accurately and controlled.
Spanning all billing touch-points, BillingPlatform’s next-generation billing system delivers the agility you need. You can automate any business process, comply with regional and international accounting standards, adhere to global regulatory and country-specific legislations, reduce revenue loss, create and deliver accurate and timely invoices. All of which will improve your customer relationships. Contact our team today to see how we can help get you on the path to billing automation!
