Zone & Co CFO Chad Wonderling hosted a panel discussion at SuiteWorld 2024 to discuss how real-world companies are embracing usage-based billing models to drive financial efficiency and scalability.
Industry experts Blake Disiere, Associate Director, Core Business Operations at Vista Equity Partners, and Brian Raley, Director of Financial Information Systems at SentinelOne, explain how ZoneBilling helps overcome challenges like quote-to-cash maturity, complex subscription management, strong tech stack integrations between core systems like NetSuite and Salesforce, complete automation of billing and revenue recognition, higher transaction volumes, and much more.
The three discussed practical insights into avoiding common pitfalls and implementing best practices to optimize financial operations. Below are key points from their discussion.
Key Takeaways
Digital transformation of order-to-cash (OTC)
- Companies should consider whether platform solutions are flexible and extendable enough to capture all use cases that may occur in the future, regardless of how simple or complicated that might be.
- Ideally, contracts should be automated to the greatest extent possible – when every contract is a touchpoint, it can slow down your operations and stall revenue and growth.
- Many companies create their own billing solutions with NetSuite and Salesforce, but these processes often can’t keep up as the business scales by changing pricing models, adding products, acquiring additional solutions or expanding into new markets, etc.
Billing and revenue recognition
- Billing and revenue recognition aren’t separate processes – there is a lot of interconnectivity, and solutions should consider the entire workflow to optimize systems, processes, and data.
- Billing and revenue recognition managed by separate systems can introduce complexity. Keeping both engines in the same place streamlines how contract assets translate to unbilled revenue.
- Solutions that keep billing and revenue recognition engines entirely within NetSuite can lower risk of discrepancy by allowing teams to effectively manage timely and accurate data flow into a CRM platform.
Amendments
- The standard approach to contract amendments with NetSuite is “rip and replace” – closing the old contract with prorated calculations and preparing a new one.
- These activities can be extremely stressful burdens for billing and revenue teams, especially when they occur near the end of a month or quarter.
- The right platform should enable billing and revenue to update prospectively, leading to turnkey processes that keep revenue flowing (hint: ZoneBilling does this).
Integrating ERPs and CRMs
- CPQ language of subscriptions, contracts, subscription lines, and order lines don’t always translate well to standard NetSuite records like sales, orders, building schedules, etc. This leads to time-consuming manual processes downstream.
- Matching quotes and contracts and contractual complexity are all liabilities with customers and lead to slow and error-prone manual processes.
- ZoneBilling ensures systems are speaking the same language to minimize delays and improve the customer experience.
Practical advice for OTC digital transformation
- Ensure you have a good understanding of your customer hierarchy that maps well to your billing system.
- Systems need to be agile and flexible to prepare your business for confronting change.
- Know your change champions for rapid changes, and make sure someone owns success.
- If you have to implement a new system every time you launch a new product, you might not have the right system.
- Success is about clarifying your scenarios, tackling challenges one piece at a time, and understanding that nothing will be 100% perfect in the beginning.
Transforming the OTC cycle with Zone & Co
Many businesses manage revenue and billing separately given the complexity of requirements at both ends of the lead-to-revenue process. ZoneBilling allows you to bring both simple and complex billing and revenue directly into NetSuite by taking advantage of ZoneBilling's innovative architecture and NetSuite's powerful Advanced Revenue Management (ARM) functionality. Together, you have the ability to automate everything from order to ledger without losing any visibility or risking compliance.
Read this case study to learn more about the positive impact of having billing and revenue recognition in one system.
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