Top 10 Challenges in Implementing an Enterprise Billing System in 2024 and How to Overcome Them

An Enterprise Billing System is a software system which is used by the growing or established businesses in order to cater to their enterprise billing requirements. Such a software system provides an enterprise-grade solution to handle issues related to the complexity, the scale and the usability of the software system, yet ensures that the system is flexible and configurable in order to meet newer requirements relatively easily.

The Enterprise Billing landscape will typically cover subscription billing as well as the consumption billing use cases. It also caters to different types of billing such as the prepaid billing, the postpaid billing and the convergent billing. The enterprise billing system encompasses the custom billing options and the complex billing functions.

The word “enterprise” applies quite literally here and indicates that such billing platforms are meant for ensuring an “enterprise-grade” software system that can scale to handle greater transaction volumes and ensure a very high system up time through their high availability features.

Typically, when organisations are growing, they may not have software systems that can scale with their growing requirements. The software systems that they use may be designed for a certain scale and complexity. When the business grows, the issues related to the scale, the complexity and the product fitment start arising for organisations. The Top 10 challenges faced by organisations in implementing an Enterprise Billing System are discussed here:

1. Integration Issues

An enterprise software platform is often interconnected and inter-dependent on multiple software systems. An enterprise billing software is expected to have a flexible integration layer providing ability for other systems to connect and consume or post data to it. The challenges start when the platform is not tested for different business use cases and workflow and it’s underlying domain design is not flexible enough to be extended for various business scenarios.

2. Complexity in business use cases

The companies would usually start their business by using low cost subscription billing solutions. This is great up to a point. As the business grows, handling the scale and the complexity in the business use cases can start posing challenges.

3. Product fitment issues

Businesses could be using a certain systems that worked for them in their initial years, but as their product and service offerings expand, they often find that the existing systems do not meet their requirements out-of-the-box and are not flexible enough to be customised quickly.

4. System Migration

An implementation of an enterprise billing system often involves migration of billing related data from legacy software system. If the new billing platform does not have a good migration utility or tool than can easily retrieve and map data from the legacy system, then the migration can be a painful process, full of surprises and challenges. It will require more development hours and more cost. Due to lack of experienced team members, a certain data migration issues could crop up at a later stage in the project.

5. Scale

A growing organisation will need to handle more number of customer accounts and increasingly higher billing transactions such as CDR processing in telecom billing, metered read records in utility billing, more number of invoices and more number of automated payments to be processed. While growth in business should be a happy scenario for business, soon it might start becoming rather challenging to cater to the growing demands if the billing system does not scale to the requirement.

6. Unable to customise a hard wired solution

A very low cost solution may not be able to provide the flexibility that an enterprise grade billing solution can provide. Such a low cost solution might be adept for certain scenarios, but for enterprise billing requirements a comprehensive billing solution is required.

7. Usability and Configuration

If the billing system is not easy to use by users and rather harder to adopt, then it will lead to staff training issues. An enterprise billing software should manage a lot of system complexity, yet be easy to use and configure. The user training issues and the lack of software configuration leads to a lot of person hours being lost on projects.

8. Performance / Reliability Issues

The systems need to provide optimum performance with growing volumes and complexity. It is seen that some software systems perform well initially in the project, but cannot maintain optimal system performance with growing complexity of requirements and scaling of volumes. For an enterprise billing system, it is all the more important to be providing reliable results, whether it is billing or rating. Also, such systems need to be fault tolerant and auto recover from a failed scenario with a proper monitoring mechanism.

9. Security, Compliance and Regulatory Challenges

This is an ongoing challenge, which requires a dedicated team in the organisation making sure that the platform is meeting the requisite security, compliance and regulatory requirements. Most of the times, the security requirements are driven by the compliance standards.

10. Operational Issues

As the number of customer accounts or transaction volumes grow, so do the complaints that can come from them due to incorrect billing and charging issues. Billing ops can be ill-prepared for growth scenarios if it is not using an enterprise-grade software system.

An enterprise billing software should be designed to provide solutions to above mentioned issues. Some of the above mentioned challenges should directly be addressed in the platform, while some others also involve how the team is oriented and guided for providing the solutions.

This section briefly describes how the an enterprise billing software which is implemented well helps overcome the above mentioned challenges. Let us look at them one by one:

1. Integration Issues

An enterprise billing system needs to provide a very flexible and well documented API layer which should be also available on the REST layer. If there are also other legacy API integration options like SOAP and Hessian, then it makes the platform more suitable for certain use cases and technology. Having well tested and well documented API is the most crucial aspect to resolve this challenge.

2. Handling complexity in business use cases

The billing platform needs to be extensible and easy to customise. It should have smaller development cycles and the changes made to the system should not affect the core functionality. If the platform architecture and design meets this requirement, it makes implementation of complex changes relatively easier and saves efforts throughout the project implementation and maintenance phases.

3. Product fitment issues

The solution should cater to host of business requirements and require less development. If the platform is flexible to adopt to changes in requirements, it makes the job of the implementation team a lot easier.

5. Scale

If the enterprise billing software platform can scale horizontally as well as dynamically to cater to growing volumes, then it means as a business you are at ease with the sudden business growth scenario. If you have a proven platform, that makes it easier for you to channelise your business growth and focus more on your business than on the systems that support the business.

6. Unable to customise a hard wired solution

As an organisation, you will invariably come up with new ideas, schemes and plans that need new development and customisation of your existing systems. If the platform can be customised rapidly, that means quick time to market for your innovative ideas. This helps boost innovation in the organisation and gives good returns on investments.

7. Usability and Configuration

If you make a well considered choice for your enterprise billing system that is really easy to use and administer from your end, it takes away your reliance from your billing system vendor. Your billing ops team is well trained to handle any issues or new requirements. If the platform can be configured to meet various requirements, this means quick solutions to your business demands and served well internally.

8. System Performance and Reliability

The platform should be able to provide you some reliable bench-marking figures about system performance for various use cases. The system should have previous case studies of successful implementations. If you choose such a platform and vendor, the chances of implementation succeeding will be quite high.

9. Security and Compliance, Regulatory Challenges

If the platform meets ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II and PCI DSS compliance standards, it is likely that it will meet most of the security, compliance and regulatory requirements. The regulatory requirements vary from country to country, however meeting the mentioned certification standards develops a solid foundation and makes it easier for platform to meet the country specific regulatory requirements.

10. Operational Issues

A stable and reliable enterprise billing software platform will lead to less issues and less support. Also, the vendor needs to have good experience to handle billing support issues and resolve them efficiently. This will ensure that the billing ops team is not overstretched and able to contribute to business and sales functions by giving them effective inputs.

EarnBill – a well rounded and time tested Enterprise Billing System

EarnBill has been implemented for various business use cases and in various industries. It was specifically designed to be an enterprise platform and through its many implementations has evolved into a well rounded enterprise billing system. The team supports you well throughout the implementation and maintenance phases, and makes sure you are not blocked at any time.

EarnBill is a flexible, time tested platform and has a reliable team that you can count on!