Billing management and automation: The tech stack for SaaS companies

In today’s fast-paced SaaS landscape, staying ahead means mastering automation and streamlining operations. But how do SaaS companies navigate the complexities of billing management while ensuring compliance and scalability? In this webinar, industry experts from Zone & Co and Greenstep will break down the key strategies and tools you need to drive efficiency and maximize growth.

If you’re a Controller, CFO, VP of Finance, or Revenue Accountant in the SaaS space, this webinar is designed for you. While usage-based pricing models are gaining traction, they introduce complex billing and revenue recognition challenges. In fact, 60% of companies in our internal survey reported issues with contract amendments, data accuracy, and manual workloads related to consumption billing.

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Transcript

Quentin Lievre: So, hi everyone and welcome to today's webinar. We have an incredible panel of experts with us today who will share some of their firsthand perspectives on usage-based pricing, also known as consumption billing, or variable pricing.

Usage-based billing models have actually changed the subscription economy by providing flexibility and scalability that traditional pricing structures simply can't match. But with this change comes a new layer of complexity.

Billing, which was once a straightforward operational task, must now accommodate tier pricing, usage patterns, dynamic thresholds, and a large range of other variables. This not only makes it difficult to produce accurate and timely bills, but it also complicates your processes within your CRM and ERP. So many companies are still navigating how to implement it effectively, and this might be the reason why you are actually attending today.

So pricing strategy is a critical driver of business growth and scalability. It has influenced in revenue recognition, cash flow, renewals, upsells, even downsells, and also customer churn. So with such a wide variety of potential models to choose from, understanding the opportunities and the trade-offs of each model is essential.

So today we're fortunate enough, as I said, to be joined by two experts who have analyzed and advised hundreds of companies on pricing and billing strategies, and they'll share their unique perspective and insights helping us to explore some of the best practices and the key considerations for quote-to-cash success.

So with that being said we'll do some introductions as you see here. The pictures well I'll actually start first. That's the easiest. So, my name is Quentin or Quentin. I'm based in the Netherlands. I'm the sales director of greenstep. I've been working in the NetSuite ecosystem for actually the past eight years- seven at Oracle NetSuite itself past year here at Greenstep. And this actually experience from the past eight years with NetSuite has given me the opportunity to meet with hundreds of leaders who were looking at ways to transform, centralize, and streamline their quote-to-cash and financial processes.

Now for the past year at at Greenstep. Just a little backstory, what really makes Greenstep unique is our holistic approach to business transformation. We've grown from being an accounting, tech and HR services provider in the Nordics, originally from Finland, to become a true international back office partner for everything around finance and tech.

So we offer consulting in Oracle, NetSuite, Salesforce obviously as well, BI and sustainability consulting on top of everything, what I mentioned before. And we have a team spread over six countries. And well one of these, these team members is the second panelist.

Petteri is our Salesforce business operations lead at Greenstep. He has over 20 years of experience in developing ICT functions for businesses. He's also a certified TOGAF architect and has extensive knowledge and experience in key business processes beyond IT. The third one is James, and I'll let you introduce yourself, James.

James Hewitt: Thank you and thank everybody for taking the time out of your day today to to join us here.

So my name's James and I am one of the EMEA leadership over in Zone & Co. My primary responsibility is focused on ZoneBilling, enterprise billing and revenue product. Just by way of a little bit of an intro to me personally. So, I was an accountant for many years, for most of my career, so 12 plus years in senior finance roles using these tools in various different businesses. I then moved into implementing NetSuite and then NetSuite partnership and, and then transitioned into Zone.

So I can wear several hats as I like to say through, through these conversations. And, and of course welcome any questions in any of those realms as we go through, as I'm sure Petteri will as well.

So please drop those into the, into the chat. Just by way of introduction now to Zone. So. Zone & Co is a provider of software that sits within the NetSuite environment. So we solely make solutions for, for NetSuite. We've got a, we're a global business. We're one of the largest SDN partners and so solution providers for NetSuite globally. At the moment we currently hold about 10% of the, the NetSuite ecosystem is. Is using our, using one of our products. So we, we provide products across the finance operation space and in the different cycles, of course, focused on order-to-cash today. So it's good to meet you all.

Quentin Lievre: Thank you, James.

So thanks for being here today and looking forward to some of your thoughts and insights. So please, along that presentation, do not hesitate to write some questions down in the chat. We'll do our best to answer them live and otherwise we'll park them till, till the end or a follow up. So, okay. Now today's agenda we're first going to start up with a quick little background.

And context of what CPQ and quote-to-cash optimization in SaaS mean for the industry. Then we'll turn to James. Well, James will turn the speak to Petteri who will go through the beginning of the process and how sales and finance can work better together. And we're then going to take the conversation layer deeper with James explaining how Zone for NetSuite are the best fit for commercial aspects after CRM and CPQ.

So we'll hear about some of the implications that it might have on data integrations and the functional processes and how it impacts different areas of your business. I hope it will give you some insights into how to navigate your own pricing strategies eventually. Then lastly again, depending on the number of time, we'll answer live to your questions.

So well, James. Over to you.

James Hewitt: Okay, great. So yeah, we wanted to, we wanted to start talking about what we see across the, the market from a, a Zone and a Greenstep perspective. So we as a Zone and as a ZoneBilling and of course built in NetSuite, typically a very, very strong vertical for them is, is of course SaaS.

But what's interesting in the, as we speak to many different SaaS businesses, there there's challenges arising and Quentin has picked up on a few of these already. The monetization models are changing. And we see this, and I like to say, even when I get on discovery calls with a lot of SaaS businesses and we staff call, Hey, we're a simple SaaS business you know, standard SaaS.

What's interesting now is that we are not seeing a standard SaaS, a standard, "This is the software. This is what we, we, we see. It's a, it's a subscription." And I'll come onto that a little bit later and we'll talk to, subscriptions, but it, it, we're not seeing simple, simple SaaS and the monetization models are driving that.

So Quentin mentioned a couple there, you know, usage based billing. Typically, most of the SaaS businesses that I, I work with have yes, a subscription part, but they've got multiple products. So they'll have, so the challenges now that we see is they've got multiple products on an agreement to, or a, or an order with a, with a customer base.

And that might include a simple fixed recurring, but more often than not, what it also includes is a managed service, a variable element in in there, as well as another product which can have some usage and some variability about it. And that might be as simple as monthly billing and, and monthly usage of a certain unit to retained units where they're paying for upfront.

What we're also seeing as well that's quite common is there's also then a professional services element to this. So through all of this, what it's actually creating is a complex model outside of just simple SaaS that around the originating products that need. The technology stack to, to stand up to it.

And that starts of course, and we're going to hear from Petteri shortly in terms of what that means from a CRM. And, of course this now leans towards CPQ. But then the challenge thereafter is how do you get a technology stack that is still controlled, still based in the realms of being able to transact, to be able to get visibility and reporting, and have adhere to all those challenges while also being flexible. Being flexible to them moving into what, what we see SaaS businesses wanting to achieve. So, you know, growth, everyone talks about growth and, and, and wants to grow, wants to monetize different services. International expansion is a, is a key, key part to what we see in these types of businesses.

And of course, NetSuite is a foundation for that is a great ERP tool to facilitate that. So we see them wanting flexibility. We see them wanting to achieve automation. You know, I, I speak to a lot of private equity houses and portcos within there, and the drive for top line growth is still there, but also optimization and bottom line growth and, and depending on the enterprise valuation and, and how that's the different mechanics there, there's always this trade off.

So, what we see SaaS businesses looking to achieve is, is the best of both. How can we get a technology stack that can be, that's flexible and can monetize what we need to, to maximize the revenue, maximize the cash into the business and of course, control it while also being optimized and being streamlined and. Streamlined automation on this side. Again, we'll talk a lot about that today because getting the right technologies is very, very key. And also getting the right data.

So in terms of technologies and a couple of the other things that I see is. A little bit to that point as well. We're going to talk about CRM CPQ and, and ERP one of the common factors that I see that raises more challenge than not is actually when businesses don't consider this end-to-end, when there isn't the consideration of. Well, actually what we do up in Salesforce and what we do up in our CRM and our CPQ is absolutely going to have an impact in how we bill and how we recognize revenue.

And we come back to data. We come back to the control of data and then the processes that then run thereafter. And without consideration at the end to end, it's really, really difficult to not fall into the trap of having siloed processes. So from a technology stance, really what's out there? Well, we, we are going to talk about arguably the most common technology stack out there at the moment. Which is Salesforce and NetSuite. And for SaaS and for FinTech business, business services, these verticals, of course, NetSuite goes into others, as does Salesforce, but for these industries in particular, we see it as the go-to. And, and we, we look to, to support that obviously as, as Greenstep and, and we'll talk about how Zone fits in.

And then the other factor we're going to talk about today, which is really, really key and link to this end to end is, is getting the right activities in the right place. Now that we have cloud-based technologies and cloud-based systems, and the two that we're going to talk about today, being the most widely used, and leaders in it, you've got the ability to plug in the best tools, you can plug in the best tools, but they, they're built to be the best at what they do.

And, and this again, is going to be a key talk track and key theme for us today is- you've got the opportunity to do that. So let's get the, the right activities in the right tools. And this is a really key you know, error or mistake or, or challenge that I see in, in businesses, again, coming back to the overall technology stack because if you don't get the right data in the right place, if you don't get the right tools to do the right things, invariably you will not be able to achieve some of the things that I've mentioned before.

You won't be able to achieve a streamlined system. You won't be able to achieve that growth sustainably. You won't be able to monetize where you need to instill control. The cash or the revenue recognition, IFRS and all these other things that, that come along with the orders cash process. So, they're the main considerations to take into account.

Quentin Lievre: And James, just to add to that, and maybe I'm ahead of some questions from the audience, but you know what we see is that some companies want to phase out the delivery of these type of solutions.

I mean, and not phase out, but, have one piece and then the other. What can you tell more maybe about the impact of that or the best practices.

James Hewitt: For sure. So that's a good question. So the, I mean, phasing, I would always default to saying that do, doing everything in phase one is preferable, even though you might, and that doesn't mean big bang in terms of how you go live.

'cause we know that you know, depending on the, the type of business and the complexity, big bang might not suit. But really that's a, that's an implementation deployment question and a project question rather than actually the consideration of the technology and the consideration of the technology for me should always be done upfront.

Again, it goes back to that how it's considered when it's considered, but what I would say Quentin is that we, we see an awful lot of phased approaches as you guys do. So it's, it's, is it doable? Absolutely. Can you have your CRM in a state where, you are, you actually, you, we see a lot of businesses that are already on Salesforce. They're already on Salesforce, they've already got their structures and, and now it's a change of ERP or now it's a let's select a billing and revenue tool that's going to best fit our, our business. And then you deploy it thereafter.

We see some that then deploy NetSuite and and Zone thereafter. So it can absolutely be done. But as I say, the assessment of it. It is best done in, in one phase. And the, the reason I mention that is just to avoid rework is, is to avoid different cutovers. It's to avoid having to potentially change structures throughout the technology stack. So. Both approaches, absolutely feasible.

And, and I'm going to do a bit of a, an overarching, probably not very helpful comment in that. It depends. It depends on the business. I think, you know, if you, and if you get the right technology that's flexible enough and powerful enough, you can do.

I mean, we see a lot of businesses that, as I mentioned already on Salesforce. They take up NetSuite and Endzone, preferably in that first phase of the ERP because it changes the structure of how you do order to cash and they might not integrate from phase one and then the integration might come as phase two. We see that's quite, quite common. So as long as your tools are flexible enough to do it and you're not having to rework at all, it can absolutely work right.

Quentin Lievre: I think on, on I mean, I don't know James, but I think Petteri was you know, considering the, the start indeed of that whole, you know, end to end process. So absolutely.

James Hewitt: So we'll move on. Moving on, and I, I will segue over if there's no more questions at, at this stage. Yeah, we'll move over to Pari to talk about CRM and and CBQ in Salesforce.

Petteri Heinonen: Okay. Thank you. Thank you James. And thank you everyone online for, for attending and indeed before James gets further into the details, how Zone can, can help support all those different monetization pricing, licensing models you might have in, in your SaaS business. I thought that I would take a, a moment to go through, let's say the, the front office side, the sales side of, of things first and, and share some of my, my experiences in, in, in that area.

Like James mentioned, we think that Salesforce is, is probably the best CRM solution for, for SaaS companies. That's also my, my experience or also many of the things that we discuss here. You could at least in theory, generalize this to to, to any CRM system. But but our experience is that, that Salesforce is sort of the core solution in the sense that it provides a really good starting point. It provides, sort of very thought processes, how to, how to do sales and sales management at the same time, it also provides huge third party library of, of additional applications and, and, and tools as well as the flexibility needed. So, so I feel that it's in this sweet spot, in, in, in that sense.

But yeah not going to go too deep into, into the marketing side. But James, if you if you click once and, and we hopefully get the, the animations going. So, so let's, let's say a few, few words about the, about the let's say marketing and sales interface. Lead intake of course is, is usually the first step in the, in the whole, let's say lead to cash process and, couple of couple of thoughts about that. Especially with now with, with all the AI developments , I feel that one of the critical things here, of course, you need to have the fundamentals in place like, like good integration with the website and whatever other resources you may, may have and, and so forth, data quality enriching data, kind of basic things.

But I would maybe pay a little bit more attention to is that sort of categorizing the delete because, we have, we have basically three different basic alternatives. How to, how to process the leads. We can try to fully automate it. So if we categorize lead as, as something that does not need, you know, human reps, you, you can automate it fully to do a, a kind of standard, standard actions. You could on the other end you could put it into a queue or, or a line for, for human reps to, to actually handle and, and, and address the lead. But now with the advent of AI and with all the capabilities AI brings, there is actually a third third alternative you could do some sort of AI supported handling of, of some of the leads.

And I think that it's, it's really important to, to try to categorize the leads as early as possible so that you can you know do this, this categorization and automatic decision how to handle the leads, what's the best approach for each of the leads? And, and optimize the resourcing, optimize the, the time spent with, with each of the leads properly. Kind of golden leads should be, should be managed and, and processed by, by humans. But then lower end leads, but then those can be fully automated. And then AI used to, to support everything in, in between.

But yeah, let's, let's move on to the, the next stage. So this is maybe the traditional, most traditional thing that what, what CRM, like, like Salesforce does. And, and Salesforce of course is, is really strong here. So we are essentially talking about the opportunity pipeline.

Couple of, couple of maybe thoughts or perspectives on, on that? The way we would like to see Salesforce or any CRM is that it, it it, it could, it could be thought as a wi call for the sales leadership to actually put the sales playbook, sales policies into action. And it's, it's very efficient way to, to do that no matter how much you tried sales policies or, or slide decks or, or documentation. It's, it's very difficult to. To put all of that into practice unless it's, it's nicely implemented in the actual CRM system.

And there's kind of two aspects of it. One is, of course, having certain controls, certain validation rules ensuring that certain steps are taken during the sales process. But I think that equally important, if not even more important, is to make sure that the CRM provides lots of help. And it, it sort of becomes the best friend of, of a sales rep.

So we should try to implement the CRM so that it actually provides constant help for, for, for the sales reps. It can automate scheduling meetings, it can automate taking notes from the meetings. It can provide additional interest data without the rep having to go to, to all sorts of, external services to find basic, basic details of the, of the potential customer.

So we would always need to I would recommend always keeping this mindset that how we can build the CRM into, into such to watch such a vision where it, it's, it's really becomes something that sales rep truly want to use every day to organize, organize their, their work.

Yeah. Then we actually start to get closer, closer to the interface to, to the back office once we, once we get towards the later stages in the, in the pipeline opportunity. Pipeline we start creating quotes and, and, and contracts. And that's of course, critical, critical, critical states in SaaS business, but in, in every business, how to, how to do that in, in accurate and sort of accurate, but still easy to use fashion.

And, and with SaaS there is this, this extra, let's say extra dimension which we didn't have in traditional business. So, so it's, it's the, as the, the dimension of time. So when we are quoting anything in SaaS, we actually have to take into account not only the unit price, not only the amount of licenses or, or volume of usage-based things. We also need to take into account the, the time dimension.

So that's, that's something special that the quoting or CPQ tool at this, these dates, it must be, must be designed from the ground up to support, support. Also this, this aspects, so we talk about things like, like prorating and co-term and, and so forth.

Yeah. And of course CPQ I, I mentioned sales playbook, sales policies. It's of course critical also to, to apply those into the sales process. So we need to have, we, we, we might want to have, for example, discount policies and, and, and so forth. And, and maybe the, if, if we want to. Highlight one specific thing about quoting and contracting and CPQ tools related.

It needs to be, CPQ must be designed from the crown up so that the quotes and the, the eventual orders we placed with they are accurate. They need to, they need to have all the data needed for the, for the rest of the stages in the process.

James Hewitt: Petteri just, just, just before I move on, I, I've actually got a question here others may be, may be asking. Yeah. I get, I get asked it a lot during this process. What are the common, have you got a couple of common examples of when you would need to deploy a CPQ rather than just a, the standard CRM Salesforce process?

Petteri Heinonen: Yeah. At least one very easy, let's say, sign to, to look after is that if you start to have, if you start to notice lots of kind of back and forth discussions between your sales reps and your sales operations or commercial operations, that sort of the indication that the quoting process and the sales process is starting to become too difficult to manage for the sales reps. Producing accurate quotes that are a, actually according to, to sales policies and according to the monetized system, models, according to the product catalog that you actually wish to have in, in, in place. That's, that's very kind of telltale sign sign when you, when you should start by latest planning on, on implementing a CPQ tool. Salesforce, of course, have, has, has good, good CPQ tools in the, in the catalog. So there are actually several alternatives to, to choose from regarding regarding on, on, on the specifics.

Good question. But yeah. Then. Once we are happy with the quote and customer is happy with the quote. The time comes to actually get it get it, sort of do the handover from the sales to, to the finances side. And, and that's, that's where. We, we want to build the, the CRM tool and, and CPQ tool so that it's actually as easy as possible to just turn the approved quotes into, into a sales order. And parallel to this process, we, we probably want to have some sort of e-signing solution implemented as well. Because that then makes it a lot easier to, to collect, collect the, the agreements and and, and the signatures.

For the, for the agreements, maybe one piece of advice, what I have noticed working quite well is that the, the contract structure, if possible, it should be thought from the ground up in, in such a fashion that you actually have some sort of master service agreement type of thing, which, which contains very static terms. You don't basically, basically change those terms under any conditions. It can even be public document.

And then all the all the differences and all the extra terms and conditions because you need to do with the customers here and there, you actually document those separately. So that makes it very easy, easy later on down the road because for every customer you can have collected only those exceptions to the standard, standard terms and conditions. You don't have to read through every document when you want to find out what special conditions each of the customers has.

But yeah placing the sales order is kind of the, the last step from, from sales perspective. And for that, of course the integration, what James already alluded to, that that's, that's critical part how to, how to do the integrations to both finance side and, and also the delivery side.

And this is also important when, when planning this whole, whole process and the whole tool stack. We must ensure that during the opportunity and quotation process, we collect all the information required for, for both of these functions down the down the road.

Finance side properly. I'm not saying that it's easy, but it's probably more familiar for everyone. But the, the delivery side in my experience, it, it somehow gets overlooked time to time and, and it might be because the details needed there, it, it's not very standard. It's depends on, on every SaaS business, what you actually need to call it.

You might need to collect, collect things like the first admin user for the service. You need to know where to deploy in geographically, in which data center you want to deploy, what sort of capacity the customer needs and, and so forth and all that, that information needs to collected during the, the sales phase, because otherwise it's not possible to actually automate deploying the solution in, in your SaaS infrastructure.

And yeah. With that, I think that we have sort of gone through the, the actual process maybe just to, to mentioned one additional item, which is not in, in, in that picture is that and James also mentioned it, it already earlier. You probably want to plan everything from the ground up so that you can it's very likely that at some, at some point there is a need to, to make changes to the monetization and pricing models and licensing models. You want to maybe include new tiers or, you, you might want to bundle different features differently. Some features are are, you know very valuable at some stage and, and you want to maybe monetize those differently. But later on they become kind of mainstream and, and you just want to bundle.

So it's, it's good to plan this flexibility already from the, from the very beginning. So that when, when you know there is a need to, to really make major changes to, to how you sell your product, you can do that without tearing everything apart and starting from, from square one again. So that's maybe one one. Final advice to To product catalog? Yeah, product catalog management.

James Hewitt: Petteri that, that, that comes back to that challenge that, that again we mentioned at the beginning in terms of scalability, that monetization and the flexibility to, to be able to be able to adapt and to be agile in, in what is a competitive market space.

Petteri Heinonen: I, I, I know that Zone can, can definitely handle, you know, the back office side of things and be flexible there. But I, I want to emphasize that also the CPQ tool and how already in the opportunity phase and, and during the quotation phase, you must plan at least for some amount of same flexibility already. When you start to implement your first monetization and and product catalog.

James Hewitt: So, so we, we'll, we'll, we'll segue over then. Thank you with Petteri into into now after the CRM and the CPQ decided on the integration techniques and how that's all going to going to come together.

And then we're going to move into billing and revenue management. Now, the first thing I would say is and, and I, I, I believe this is fair to say, but Salesforce, even other billing engines that sit outside of the ERP are not finance solutions. They're not the finance tool. The finance tool is your ERP, it's your accounting software that sits alongside or in parallel with, with the CRM and with the CPQ. And, and that's going to be a, a really common, common theme here because one of the big, one of the big decisions that, that businesses are, are faced with is where to sit billing and, and revenue management.

And we are a firm believer that it should be within your accounting tool. Invoicing drives cash. It's a finance function in, in the sense that it's going to create an obligation for the accounts, for cash and for revenue recognition.

So, before I go into the, a little bit more of the how and, and I, I'll answer a question here, which was, which is the best traditional or, or or variable billing? In, in this slide here, because I talk about subscriptions and I mentioned this at the beginning. And I will take traditional as maybe more of the kind of fixed, recurring subscription based that we see have seen in SaaS over the. Over the years. I hope I've placed that correctly. Because that's the first box here on the, the top left hand side.

And, and we do see that. Is it the best for some businesses? Yes. It can still be a, a fit if it's a single product that you know, that, that can, that can work. I think where we then start to see this variable billing is in, in a couple of places is considering the economics of the business, so this could be actually, you look at your cost base and you, this could be AI's driving a lot of this at the moment because you are paying AI agents and agencies to the, for the amount of clicks or the amount of searches and the variable elements, and you may want to pass that on.

That can be quite difficult to fit within a traditional pricing methodology. 'cause where do you sit it, where's your headroom? How do you make sure that you are not too exposed from a margin perspective that I mentioned at the very beginning in terms of maintaining that, that bottom, bottom line or at least that you, your gross, gross profit.

So, so keeping that variability and that agility gives you that. It, it means that actually you are hedging against there being a big usage and a lower, lower usage, and you are matching your cost base to your billing.

Coming from the other angle, customers, customers, more than ever, we see it want more visibility. They want to see what's going, they wanna see their consumption. They're asking more questions about, well what does it include? What am I being charged for? And these types of, of scenarios, and this is where. This starts to then match into what Petteri's just been talking about, about having the agility in the price books and the variable elements in a CPQ tool to not only be able to quote it at the beginning, but then for the billing and revenue engine to then match that and ultimately, as well, give the customer the right visibility that they, they want.

So is it best for the business? I, I can do another one of these. It depends on the economics and it depends on the product. But what I would say is that for most SaaS businesses we are dealing with, and if we come back to this slide is actually, it's not a single product subscription.

This is why there needs to, we see a lot of grouping of modules. We see, you know, and this is where Petteri, the CPQ really comes in when you start getting matrix structures. We start seeing prepaids and a few of these I've already already mentioned, but the key thing here is that the subscription is just one product, and that's one fixed recurring. And you might have a subscription that's fixed over the term, but then the rest of these have some form of variability.

The other element on here that's a real consideration for SaaS businesses, especially with IFRS and growing businesses, but also with local gap regulations and, and policies moving towards IFRS, is you can't just do a single product anymore. In a lot of instances you have to, for revenue recognition, you really have to consider the agreement you've got with your customer. How do we build that agreement in our finance tool to then be able to bill, but also to recognize revenue?

So there's a few things in there that hopefully this starts to frame well after the CRM and the CPQ and Petteri's built that up. So up, you know, at the beginning he's got the sales team firing, they're all going, they get quotes out. Then it's okay. Can we replicate what you've, what you've agreed to there within the finance tool and within the right billing and revenue engine, as I mentioned, you're faced with then do you sit it outside of the tool? If you sit it outside of your ERP, you'll never get full automation 'cause it's outside of your finance tool. So that's where we look to them move into, into NetSuite and into, of course, powered by Zone. So I hope that that answers the question.

Dom Reid: Yeah, we, we've had another question in there, James, from one, one of the audience asking what are the current trigger points for considering the change and optimization?

So, you know, when do businesses change?

James Hewitt: Yeah, no, it's a, it's a good question. So well this can be a driver, the, the products, you know so we typically we'll see there's a trigger point to move to Salesforce as you start to grow. Best in class CRM. There's then the trigger point from an ERP and a billing perspective is, is again, when you are, you are looking to take the next, it might be after a, a funding round.

It could be because you're entering a new market that's quite common, especially across EMEA. So you start to go into new markets with new regulations, different requirements, not only from a quoting, from a taxation, from a revenue perspective.

And, and really these events, or it might be a next funding round, it could be due to exit readiness or, you know, these can all be trigger points to, to take on this optimization. I, going back to the, one of the earlier points as well that, that Quentin asked is. We see people adopt it at different stages. Invariably, the earlier you adopt these, this right technology stack, even you're using it at a lower level to then build on it, the better. Then you don't have to. We see a lot of businesses that try and do this offline or use Excel or, you know, and that can also then become untenable in terms of moving forward.

So I hope that answers both, both those, those questions. Please do put in the Q&A if if I, if I haven't, I can, I can pick up. So there, there's, there's actually arguably a lot of, a lot of information on, on this side, but we've spoken about the order and contract creation and management and the CRM and CBQ upstream and now where we sit and I mentioned that we are, we are big believers in that actually your invoicing and revenue should, should sit in your, within your ERP.

Now I'm going to be balanced. There are instances where it makes sense to sit outside. Typically, these are high volume, simple transactions that can be managed elsewhere. You may want to sit there outside. Business to consumer. So B2C tends to be a little bit more fit for a, an e-commerce platform or maybe some form of supplementary system, but it all still needs to come into the finance tool. So fundamentally our belief is that it needs to sit within your ERP. So once we move in from the CRM, I would say this is the most critical point.

The biggest question for me that I work a lot with with SaaS businesses on is, okay, do you have a tool that can replicate what you've agreed with the customer from, in particular, from your CPQ to be able to do the billing? First question, and then second question will come onto revenue because as Petteri mentioned earlier, setting up the right structure. Setting up the right agreement, setting up the right data and the, the information behind it is absolutely key from the the C, the CRM CPQ. But then it's also now key that we can then move it into the finance solution and the finance tool because visibility of that and we, we at Zone like to call it, I like to talk about it being a contract because it's got multiple products, not just one 'cause that's what's been agreed to with the, with the customer, this is absolutely critical.

So getting, having a record, having the right fields, having the right structure and architecture within the ERP and within your finance solution to be able to manage that contract and that order is really, really key. The, the, the best example arguably of this is, is within any ERP system, typically it comes into what would be an order or a sales order.

Now in traditional manufacturing, engineering, that's what sales doors were built for. They're very good at it and you still use it. We still use it when we need to, if there's a, an inventory element, but actually what it doesn't do is a lot of what we've talked spoken about today in terms of the flexibility. And the ability to be a contract and to move and to be agile.

But while I talk about that, the key thing here though, and this is why we're great believers in that it should be in your finance tool, we're still underpinned by the finance structure within the ERP. So I haven't seen the, the, the full list, but for those that are finance professionals or financial controllers, I put my finance hat on all variability and monetization and all this good stuff. What does it need to be underpinned by when it comes to the finance, and this is where the two things can really work in harmony, is it still needs to be underpinned by the financial control, which is, is the item set up correctly for revenue recognition and how that's then processed through the accounts, how it's posted to the GL. Are we, you know, are we going to make sure that the invoice layout's right? The taxation is correct, and all of these different statutory elements. And also then the reporting that comes out of all of this and joins together with the CRM. Really, really key consideration.

So as we go through the process, this is what we're looking to do. So we're looking, and for me, best practice is to get it into your, the ERP. Then what you can do is you can do the calculations that need to be done.

So Petteri mentioned the fulfillment that can happen in here. We can fulfill, we can rate and calculate, we can manage both the traditional fixed, but we can also manage the variable. So we can do both, but we can do that in such a way that we can then be able to create invoices and distribute them in the right way.

The other thing that Petteri mentioned, and we see, I'm seeing more and more of this is having a master service agreement. So having a contract and then different contract structures. Again, another key part of the, the, the architecture that you'd need within your ERP to get automation and to get invoices out correctly, like consolidated invoices for, for as an example.

And revenue. Revenue is a key factor in here. You can't automate your revenue if your finance tool doesn't know what it has to recognize.

And when it comes to variable billing, this is a really, really key component. And anytime that I see this done in external billing tools that don't sit within the finance tool is you are never able, able, able to or, and what I mean by that is the financial needs, the inputs to be able to consume it, to then recognize the revenue correctly.

Quick example would be retained units, or, or, or prepaid is a good example here. If they're not fixed for the period and, you know, you may have some kind of write off, you may have some kind of kickback at the end if they don't use them all. Well, actually it needs to be done on consumption. So you bill up front. But then to automate the revenue it needs to know the consumption. It needs to have those data points to be able to drive what is a very powerful revenue tool in NetSuite to do it. And that's where your billing and revenue engine comes, comes together, driven off of the right record with the information and the data.

And then I've mentioned, I've mentioned, again, we, we move back into the, the, the, the core finance functions here in terms of managing cash, managing accounts receivable and tax and compliance and, and financial reporting.

So you know, really what we're, what we're presenting and, and hopefully the themes coming through from, from this discussion are. You can have an optimized technology stack that is both scalable, flexible, but is also controlled because we're going to underpin it in the ERP and the finance solution.

And really we talk about having the best of both, and this is where we see businesses really capitalizing on, on this structure and being able to then launch into all the different variables that you need to as a business within the the current current climate.

Quentin Lievre: I just had a, I just had one question, James. Just because, you know, in the audience as well, maybe, maybe, you know, some are considering this, or at least I've, I've seen that as well that, you know, Salesforce has a, a billing and, and I mean, and revenue capabilities.

So, you know, for the people who are maybe already using Salesforce and, and considering to expand that, you know, what are, what are your, the, the key considerations and best practices you need to, well, maybe not per se use, you know, Salesforce's billing and revenue capabilities, but choose for that architecture of, you know, CRM and ERP combination.

James Hewitt: Yeah. Yeah. Good, good question. So the, the couple of key, couple of key points to consider and the, the first thing I mentioned the record, you need in, in, in your finance tool, because if you do very simple invoicing, then something like a Salesforce or another external billing tool can do that.

It, it can actually do that and, and, and it can do the kind of, okay, we've created an invoice. That's what's gone out to the customer. And then what we're going to do is we're going to just process an invoice through a journal into our ERP system. That's typically what we would, what we would see happen if that external was used.

And actually can that work? Yes. It can't have any complexity. It can't have any flexibility. It can't change. It can't move, it can't do any of that because you've effectively put a journal. Or a simple invoice record into, into your ERP.

As I mentioned earlier, are there instances where sometimes that's works and that's adequate? Yes. Are you, you know, you're not really sweating NetSuite as an asset and you've still gotta do your tax compliance and other things within your finance tool, so there's that.

The revenue though, for me, revenue is a massive trigger because if there's any variable elements or complexity around revenue or anything like that, even if you use an external tool, such as in in Revenue Cloud in Salesforce.

You are then very restricted in what you put into your ERP, and you then created a difference between the invoice coming in and the revenue recognition, and then you start to build these challenges. When it comes to being able to automate it even, even actually being able to reconcile it can be quite difficult because NetSuite has a very strong advanced revenue module.

But that only works if you feed it the right information and it will do all the automatic reconciliations and reclassifications, all that stuff. You lose that capability completely if you do anything upstream. And as I mentioned, fundamentally it's not a finance tool. So whatever you do in there, you're having to replicate or manually do within the ERP.

Quentin Lievre: Thanks. Very clear. So I think we're we've reached the end of, of, of that webinar, the end of the hour. We've still got two or three minutes for any questions in the Q&A. If anyone wants to ask something specific, we're here to, to answer these. Otherwise, I think that we're going to wrap up. Well thank you very much for.

For attending that webinar. I hope we shared some, some insightful experiences on our own. So on, on Salesforce, NetSuite, and Zone and Co. You know, if, if any questions pop up after the webinar do not hesitate to co to contact us. Oh, well we have a question. Last question from Vera, we have a question saying how different from other tools, so indeed, other tools on the market.

Maybe how does that differentiate?

James Hewitt: Yeah. Is, is that from a, a billing? A billing? Should I say there's a billing and revenue rather than a Salesforce one or I don't know who that's, who that same Oh, very, very. A billing. A billing and revenue. Thank you. So, so yeah, just, just very briefly on that, I've mentioned some of the, some of the factors here.

We are native within. NetSuite to be able to drive automation, visibility, control, and flexibility. Flexibility is a key thing here. Having a contract structure makes us very, very different. And the other billing tools on the market, sit outside of, sit outside of NetSuite, Salesforce included. And where we see that, we see really complex architecture and IT architecture structures.

You typically have two or three more systems that are in place to manage the billing and revenue automation. You know, so for us, where we differentiate is a couple of key areas. One completely within the finance tool, which means we can leverage automation and, and processes better than anyone else, and in a more simplistic a architecture.

And, and, and secondly, we, we, you know, we, we reduce those manual entry points. You know, it's a bit of an automation point as well here, but we can give the complexity into the ERP and hit all that you need that we've spoken about. Today, a lot of subscription billing tools that you'll come across manage one product.

I mentioned one product, more traditional rather than, you know variable. And some of them do it pretty well in terms of a traditional and variable for one product, but contract structures they fall over on. So hopefully that's answered.

Quentin Lievre: Great. Well thank you very much. Thank you, Petteri. Thank you James as well, and have a great rest of the day.

James Hewitt: Thank you everyone.

Quentin Lievre: Bye-Bye.