How to Gain Real-Time Visibility and Transparency in Your Finances Using SuiteBilling

By: Chris Haiss

If you’re in the service business industry, having real-time visibility and transparency in your finances is critical.

As your business moves to the cloud, you may be wondering how you could streamline your billing process to make the experience seamless for your customers.

With the move to a subscription economy, businesses need a way to generate invoices that accurately reflect pricing and consumption over a defined period.

NetSuite SuiteBilling helps companies streamline billing operations, providing real-time visibility into billing and financial activity. From consolidated invoicing, automated rating processes and support of multiple pricing models, SuiteBilling provides transparency around all billing activities.

Pricing Models

SuiteBilling supports multiple pricing models, making it possible to bill customers in a variety of ways, ranging from a simple flat rate each billing cycle to complex volume or tiered scenarios.

Flat Model

Charge customers the same value each billing cycle.

Volume Model

Based on consumption or entitlement where the highest volume tier unit rate reached is applied to the entire quantity to charge.

Tiered Model

Where the rate for each unit of consumption or entitlement tier is applied to a given range. The total end rated value is comprised of varying per unit rates to achieve the final amount to charge.

Rating Models

Flexible options give businesses the choice of billing subscriptions as either one-time charges or recurring fees, either in-advance or in-arrears. With multiple rating models, companies can create subscriptions that capture setup fees, license counts and variable consumption all in one step. The combination of easy subscription set up and maintenance, and flexible rating models significantly increases billing process efficiency.

Subscription and Renewal Management

SuiteBilling supports subscription models from evergreen to traditional time-based (e.g. 1-year, 3-year). Changes to subscriptions such as upsell, down sell, suspend and terminate are easily managed. Revenue leakage is reduced with automated renewals.

SuiteBilling Screenshot

Change Orders

SuiteBilling allows organizations to schedule and automate changes to subscriptions. Change orders provide the ability to schedule an immediate or future dated change to pricing and/or quantities on subscriptions.

Eliminate the need to manually monitor and track customer subscription changes. With SuiteBilling, these changes can be recorded at the time they are identified and will be active upon reaching the effective date set on the change order. All change orders support pro-rating of invoice lines to capture pricing and/or quantity changes over a period of time based on the set effective date. Further, any backdated change orders already billed to the customer, will automatically generate a credit.

Customer-Specific Pricing and Discounting

SuiteBilling provides the ability to create both common pricing templates and customized scenarios to support customer specific deal negotiations and contracts. Generic subscriptions can be created and used for all customers or a specific subset. Customized subscriptions built off alterations to existing subscriptions, or net-new, enable users to create specific pricing and contract agreements for customers, including specific discounting rules per item in the subscription.

Reporting

Real-time reporting provides quick and easy insight into common billing and financial data, including monthly recurring revenue, total contract value and customer churn.

Key Benefits

In addition to the features I listed above, here are a few benefits that stick out to me:

  • Standard and customer-specific price plans with volume, tiered and flat pricing models
  • Powerful rating engine to automate usage/consumption billing
  • Streamline recurring subscription billing with automatic renewals
  • Manage a subscription lifecycle with flexible change orders
  • Seamlessly consolidate charges from multiple subscriptions

Need Help?

Ready to gain real-time visibility and transparency in your finances? Contact us online or give us a call at 410.685.5512 to see how SuiteBilling can streamline your billing process.

Published August 30, 2021

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