Top 10 Benefits of using Enterprise Billing Software for Big Businesses

This blog provides more insights into benefits of using Enterprise Billing Software for large businesses. It would be good to have some understanding of industries that use enterprise billing software and what their industry specific needs are before going through this blog. While there are industry specific requirements, there are some common functionalities and requirements such as customer account management, order management, inventory management, product pricing and rating, billing and invoicing, payment collection and reconciliation, and finally the financial reporting.

The benefits of using Enterprise Billing Software depend upon various factors such as choosing the right enterprise billing system, configuring it well to meet your business use cases, enhancing it to meet your unique business needs, and finally supporting and maintaining it well to achieve your business goals.

All the industries or domains explained here are primarily using an enterprise-grade billing software. Such software involves a complex integration with various other systems such as a CRM system, an ERP system, an accounting system, the telecom networks in some cases, customer portals and various devices such as consumption meters.

By using an enterprise-grade billing software, it is possible to integrate various systems and feed them with the billing and charging related data. The enterprise billing system is at the heart of entire revenue cycle for the businesses. From customer discovery, inception, quotation, contract, order placement, invoicing and payment collection (quote to cash cycle), to managing dues and dunning notifications, everything is linked with an enterprise billing system. That’s why such enterprise billing systems are also known as BRM or Billing and Revenue Management Systems.

1. Managing your Product Catalogue Complexity

The big businesses will invariably have a complex product catalogue. An enterprise billing software manages the complexity in product catalogue and makes it easier to configure and maintain pricing, track price changes and allow launching of new plans, new discounts, new sales campaigns while retiring some old offerings. Without an enterprise billing platform, maintaining products and plans can become quite challenging.

2. Charging as per the actual usage of the service offering

This is an era of “Pay As You Go”. More and more businesses heavily rely on charging their customers based on their actual usage or consumption of the service. This is also termed as usage billing or consumption billing. The enterprise billing platform offers features such as billing mediation which are crucial in this day and age to ensure that all customers are not charged uniformly but charged as per their quantitative consumption of the service.

3. Automated Billing and Invoicing

Having an automated rating and charging system helps businesses to offer their services without having to worry about the recurring revenue management. The business can focus on their products and services and focus on improving them. The automated invoicing also ensures that the legal and regulatory requirements related to charging for a recurring service are met without any issues. There is also an aspect of honouring the contract with the customers and charge them on the agreed dates.

4. Automated Revenue Collection and Payment Reconciliation

The enterprise billing platforms are capable of managing the revenue collection and reconciliation cycles. They help processing payments from stored credit cards and bank accounts. There are more payment options now a days such as mobile wallets, ACH, Bank Transfers and more.

The automated collection and reconciliation ensures that the revenue realisation takes place efficient, the cash flow for the business remains good and the bad dept remains always under control. The business can ensure they can cut on the number of cases of non payment, carry out efficient dunning notifications and suspend service for non paying customers earlier during the follow up so that there is less loss of chargeable resources.

5. Inventory Management and Reconciliation

An enterprise billing system can be integrated with an ERP system to track purchase of inventory items and those items that are tracked for sale, are tracked directly in the billing platform. It is easy to check the stock of crucial items by checking reports from the system. This allows business to ensure the internal supplies remain available and also allows asset based tracking.

6. Accurate Financial Reporting

An enterprise billing and revenue management system contains a lot of financial data which can be fed into the accounting systems. This helps business keep their finance team in charge of their revenue cycles, cash flow situation and financial reporting which is required by important stakeholders in the organisation as well as the financial auditors.

7. Automation of end-to-end workflows

An enterprise billing software is integrated to automate end-to-end workflows involved in a sales cycle. This ensures that there are clearly defined roles in the system and responsibility defined to carry out various transactions by different users or departments. This ensures segregation of responsibility through the system and clear understanding of operational duties by the team.

8. Building your own USP through combination of price and service

The billing platform is a crucial system and it can be enhanced or customised for unique offerings of the organisation. This blog is quite helpful to understand how your organisation could build up your own USP through customisation and enhancement of your enterprise billing platform.

9. Real time access to billing and rating data to your customers

Having the latest updated data available to your customers gives your business an edge over your competition. Your customers would like to know their  current consumption levels for various services they use from your organisation. There are also regulatory compliance requirements that require your business to send alerts and notifications to your customers on reaching various usage thresholds. The real time access to your billing and rating data to your customers is fast becoming a mandatory requirement which is satisfied by a well designed enterprise billing platform.

10. Using revenue data to perform MIS reporting and analytics

The reporting and analytics are fast evolving into a specific domain. Every large business is investing heavily into AI and data analytics and billing/revenue data is quite crucial data for this aspect. The revenue data can be analysed to predict revenue trends, customer churn, recommendations for plan changes by customers and more.