Selling is super important but until your quote gets converted into actual money, the whole struggle is meaningless. Your salespeople light up the fire but if you actually want to get warmed up, your finance must keep it burning. One method of having the fire up is just putting lots of thin little sticks into it the whole evening but we all know that a big pine stump will do so much better. And although initially, you need to invest some effort in lugging this heavy block, once it’s hot you can spend hours warmly enveloped in its long-lasting glow.
Whatever you do, an efficient system is key. Having one robust platform is so much better than a thousand outdated siloed solutions connected via complex integrations. Below we describe how our finance superstar – Salesforce Billing (part of the Salesforce Revenue Cloud) handles the whole quote-to-cash process on one platform, adapting to changing business models and automating the unnecessary manual work, saving your time. And we all know time is money.
Flexible pricing methods
Subscription and usage-based business models are pure gold from a revenue perspective but ask your finance team about recurring products and they’ll probably show less enthusiasm. This is because traditional billing systems were made to handle simple one-time transactions and are not suitable for invoicing using more advanced bill requirements.
Salesforce Billing is explicitly designed to handle all of the different billing use cases, including subscription with setup fees and usage-based pricing – all in one place. What’s more, taxes are calculated automatically for all line items, using standard on-platform configuration or Avalara integration.
Automated Customer Lifecycle
Selling subscription services is not only complex but also time-consuming. Calculating proration manually is a salespeople’s nightmare and if you combine the time calculations with upgrades, downgrades, and renewal scenarios, it’s almost certain that the final price will be erroneous and will need to be adjusted by the finance team.
This is why Salesforce Billing provides you with the out-of-the-box proration calculation, which takes into consideration advanced business requirements such as contract cotermination, different subscription period tiers, and free trials. Versatile billing offerings, together with validation rules, workflows, and other easily configurable point-and-click automations, assure that bills are generated accurately and without flaws. This way administration struggles to correct human errors are reduced to a minimum so that your team can finally focus on building a meaningful relationship with your customers.
360-degree view of the customer
Customer financial information is usually stuck in the old-fashioned ERP systems that are absolutely illegible for anyone other than accountants. As a result, an important part of customer information is unapproachable for the majority of your employees.
Although it’s true that this is the finance team who is responsible for keeping track of the cash flow in your company, other teams can also benefit from the easy access to Order, Contract, Invoice, and Payment data. Insight to the entire lead-to-payment process will help your support team strengthen relationships with customers while controlling units can benefit from the easily configurable financial Salesforce Reports with correctly calculated metrics such as MRR, TCV, and Churn. Furthermore, access to new chunks of transaction records will make your Business Intelligence predictions even more profound and accurate, which will help you make reasonable strategic decisions.
The data-driven approach is the future. You need to make sure to use all the information you have in the most efficient way possible. If you are interested in how the implementation of Salesforce Billing can help your company unlock its full potential, please do not hesitate to contact us!
Article by Maria Bajena.
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