How to Streamline Order-to-Cash Process With Intelligent Billing and Invoicing?

Having two equally tempting choices often delays the act of choosing, a conundrum popularly known as Buridan’s ass. Truth is, today’s digital world offers plenty of choices, be it products or services. Once you make it to the customers’ consideration set, what comes next is a test of your ability to deliver convenience, personalisation, and a positive experience. You can achieve all that with a simple, easy, and intuitive transaction mechanism. 

When something falls through the cracks during the order-to-cash process, it’s highly unlikely for a customer to return to your site or recommend you to others. This is where intelligent billing systems can help. If you are looking to streamline the entire order-to-cash process or improve billing and invoicing capabilities with intelligent process automation, this blog has everything you need to know.

Order-to-Cash Process: What Is It and Why Streamline It?

The Order-to-cash process, also known as OTC or O2C, is essentially a business process that encompasses the entire order processing system, starting from order placement to payment made to a business. The entire process consists of six steps i.e. order management, credit management, order fulfilment, order shipping, customer invoicing, accounts receivable, payment collection, and reporting. Modern organisations leverage operational billing systems to track throughout the order-to-cash process and deliver a seamless experience to customers. 

1. Order Management: This is the first step of the order-to-cash cycle which begins with a customer placing an order. This order can take place on your website, via affiliates, through sales teams, and so on. At this stage, the intelligent order processing system checks the inventory and confirms a delivery timeframe. Furthermore, it’ll check the existing credit terms to accept the order. Once all these are done, the order is recorded in the sales ledger and replenishes the inventory with automatic re-ordering via ERP system. 

2. Credit Management: Credit management is crucial for B2B businesses that offer a line of credit to customers. It helps them to reduce chances of cash flow issues and award credit based on existing credit norms or customer credit profiles. An intelligent order management software automatically sends pre-approved customers’ orders for fulfilment and maintains a centralised credit management system. For new customers, it is also possible to automate the credit check process by leveraging services of a third-party credit check provider. 

3. Order Fulfillment: At this stage of the order-to-cash cycle, an order is prepared for shipment. If your organisation offers services, a service appointment will be scheduled. Intelligent integration between an order management tool and a supply chain management system ensures that inventory is up-to-date and ready for processing orders. In case, an item goes out of stock, the system will flag it immediately and notify the customer with an option for waiting or cancellation.

4. Order Shipping: This phase involves the delivery of goods and services. With an intelligent order-to-cash cycle management system, you can easily track outgoing goods and incoming returns or refunds. You can also automate the process of generating shipping labels, sending notifications to customers, and so on. While automation can help you predict a delivery timeframe, things often go wrong, especially when you rely on other freight and parcel delivery service providers. That’s why it’s important to have a system in place that tracks delivery dates, flags orders that are taking longer to deliver, and informs the customer about the same.

5. Customer Invoicing: If you haven’t already issued an invoice to the customer, this is the time to create and send one for payment. For timely and accurate invoice processing, you can leverage customer invoicing automation and integrate it with your order management system. This can significantly reduce the manual work involved in order fulfilment checking and issuing invoices. Additionally, make sure that invoices clearly state the terms of payment. 

6. Accounts Receivable: Now it’s time for your accounts receivable team to track invoices until payments are made. This entire process can be easily accomplished with accounts receivable and bank reconciliation automation. Such automation can help you identify outstanding invoices, automate payment collection reminders, manage disputes, reduce days of sales outstanding (DSO), and so on. 

7. Payment Collections: Payment collection and monitoring is a crucial part of the order-to-cash cycle. With an automated system, you can easily trigger notifications for payment received against orders and post payments in the ledger. Having an enterprise resource planning system in place helps you to maintain a single source of truth (SSOT) for all departments and therefore streamlines the payment reconciliation process.

8. Reporting: Accessing reports and data points help your team to learn, identify gaps, and streamline processes better. With an automated billing and invoicing management system, you can have all the data in one place for understanding loopholes in the O2C cycle.

Now that you know the steps involved in the order-to-cash cycle, let’s take a look at why it’s so important to streamline this process.

• Positive Sales Growth: Accurate invoicing with a streamlined purchase process boosts customer satisfaction and encourages them to come back. This also adds to customer advocacy, leading to positive sales growth.
   
• Improved Customer Experience: An intelligent and reliable order-to-cash system enables you to improve customer experience with timely order fulfilment, seamless payment collection, and easy dispute resolution. 
   
• Reduced Overheads: An automated O2C process also reduces errors and lowers operational expenses by automating tasks that are usually done manually. This adds to the operational leverage of your organisation. 

All these benefits can be easily realised with cloud-based intelligent billing platforms. Unlike traditional platforms, they support different billing models, complex revenue models, product catalogues, and large volumes of customer data. They also remain agile as your business grows. Let’s dive deep into what an intelligent billing system is and how it can help you. 

What Is an Intelligent Billing System?

If you have been using a legacy billing system, perhaps it’s time to ask whether your existing billing system is an enabler or a barrier to business change. Customers today are looking for agility, transparency, and quality service while doing business with any brand. This means you have to be at the top of your logistical workflow. Be it updating price periodically, maintaining the product catalogue, or managing charges based on usage, you should be able to do all of them seamlessly in order to provide a positive customer experience. 

Intelligent billing systems help you to automate billing processes, streamline operations related to pricing and rating, automate subscription management, maintain product catalogue, and so on — all from the same place. 

Here’s how an intelligent billing system can help your organisation realise the benefits of end-to-end monetisation process:

• Flexible Product Catalogue: Legacy billing systems require your team to manually update pricing, track product variation, configure orders, and so on. This results in unnecessary delays, errors, and tracking issues. Intelligent billing platforms offer flexible product catalogue feature which enables you to:
   
  • Automate product recommendations
  • Offer varied pricing for complex orders
  • Have one SKU with multiple pricing structures
  • Configure different products and billing combinations
     
• Dynamic Pricing: Flexible and dynamic pricing is key to meeting changing marketing demands and user preferences. Intelligent billing systems make it easier for you to stay ahead of the competition with features like:
   
  • Trial periods
  • Multi-currency pricing
  • Demand-based pricing
  • Unlimited promotional configurations
     
• Subscription Management: Whether you are offering subscription-based models or usage-based add-ons, automated subscription management is key to efficiency. Intelligent billing platforms help you to maximise revenue and meet customer needs by automating invoice creation and payment collection for subscription-based models.
   
• Bill Calculation: Intelligent billing systems can also help your organisation to calculate event-based usage bills based on unique rating mechanisms. With automation, you can easily combine charges for all invoice line items and batch run bill cycles when needed. 
• Payments and Collections: With traditional billing systems, you may not be able to accept payments in all formats which ultimately limit customer convenience. With intelligent billing solutions, you can easily accept payments using bank cards, ACH, checks, PayPal, and more. 

How to Choose an Intelligent Billing Platform?

Be it agile monetisation, usage-based billing, or dynamic billing, intelligent billing systems help you to automate the entire order-to-cash process and do more with less. So, how do you choose an intelligent billing platform? Here are some important factors to consider:

• Ability to Handle Complexity: Depending on the nature of your business, services can have varying levels of complexities including but not limited to pricing schemes, usage-based purchases, monthly subscriptions, one-time add-ons, standard contracts, and so on. The ability to handle such complexities is a must-have for your intelligent billing solution. This will eliminate the need for changing the billing system as the business grows.
   
• Tracking and Usage: Whether you are in B2B or B2B2C or B2C, tracking and usage is another capability that your intelligent billing system must have. For example, businesses with the internet of things (IoT)-enabled services like home security rely on agile billing systems to generate usage-based bills. Such systems usually require web hooks and APIs to connect with underlying applications. In such cases, it’s highly recommended that you look for an intelligent billing system that comes with features such as real-time mediation, smart workflow triggers, and client-side pre-processors.
   
• Advanced Billing Capabilities: It’s also necessary that you look for efficient billing capabilities in an intelligent billing system. Ideally, it should have the capability to translate, consolidate, and present usage-based data and prepare line-item-wise bills. If you are in a subscription-based business, this can help you to avoid bill shock, a term used to describe subscribers’ negative feelings about unexpected charges. Your billing system should also have the capability to handle multi-currency transactions, invoicing frequency, recognise complex revenue rules, and customise invoices.
   
• The Volume of Transactions: The number of transactions that you need your billing system to process every day is a key factor to consider while choosing an intelligent billing system. Don’t consider the revenue size as synonymous with transaction volumes. 
   
• Speed of Processing: Organisations with many connected devices need a greater speed of processing for handling information upstream from invoices. That’s why you must consider the workflow processing time for factoring data into final invoices and recognising revenue. 
   
• Time to Value: What you should also consider while choosing an intelligent billing solution is the time to value (TTV). TTV varies depending on whether you are prioritising one project over another and how much time you need to complete the high-priority project. Realising the TTV of your intelligent billing partner will help you to better gauge the revenue recognition timeframe.
   
• Custom Code Requirements: Does your intelligent billing platform need custom coding when you change the business model or products, offers, etc.? This is another important question to ask. Flexible intelligent payment platforms are the best option in such cases. They help to avoid product cannibalisation or product catalogue proliferation and therefore make it easier for you to manage cross-sell and up-sell opportunities better.

Now that you know what to look for while choosing an intelligent billing solution, here are some of the most common challenges that you should seek to solve with an intelligent billing solution:

• SKU sprawl
• Revenue leakage
• Absence of a single source of truth (SSOT)
• Time-consuming financial closing processes
• Re-coding required for billing system changes
• Lack of mechanisms for quick invoice dispute resolutions
• No functionality for launching new offers or products quickly
• Reduced sales productivity because of customer billing issues 

Best Practices for Choosing An Intelligent Billing System Vendor

With so many intelligent billing system vendors available online, it isn’t an easy task to choose the best. What parameters should you look at apart from operational capabilities? Here is a checklist to help you select the best intelligent billing vendor:

• Post-sale White-glove Service: You shouldn’t choose a vendor whom you have to continuously chase for fulfilling post-sale requirements. That’s why your organisation needs an intelligent billing system vendor that commits to delivering quality post-sale service along with active communication and iterative implementation.
   
• Collaborative Partnership: Another important thing to consider while choosing a vendor is understanding whether they are ready to build a relationship with your organisation. With a shared vision of success, such partnerships are crucial for giving shape to needs and brainstorming revolutionary ideas.
   
• Monetisation Expertise: Look for billing vendors who come with experience in pricing, monetisation, packaging, billing, and pricing. This will help you minimise the risk to revenue-impacting projects as these experts help you to avoid potential pitfalls. 
   
• Complementary Tech Stack: Instead of choosing vendors that try to make authoritative decisions regarding the business process strategy, you should look for vendors that offer a complementary tech stack. The latter will have the capability to make custom configurations based on your existing systems without custom codes. 
   
• Pricing Strategy: Intelligent billing system vendors usually offer varied pricing models. Try to ignore opting for pricing models that require you to pay a certain percentage of revenue in a fiscal year or a stipulated timeframe. Such pricing models impede the revenue growth of your organisation. If a vendor is offering a low upfront cost, don’t hesitate to dig deep into the long-term cost that you’ll have to pay during the vendor relationship lifecycle. 
   
• Visibility into Customer Behavior: The next thing to consider is the intelligent billing platform’s ability to provide visibility into customer data, offer flexibility for quick adjustments, and therefore ensure reduced customer churn. When a system provides all these with accurate line-item detail for invoices, your customer support team will be able to resolve issues quickly.  
   
• Order-to-cash Automation: The next thing to check is whether the platform can automate the entire order-to-quote process. Billing and invoicing platforms often lack the operational capability to automate smart triggers, notifications, and integrations. This will help you to evaluate whether the platform will really solve your order-to-cash cycle automation issues or not. 
   
• Interoperability and Extensibility: Understanding the interoperability and extensibility of an intelligent billing platform is key to choosing a vendor. Get a holistic view of API libraries, workflow triggers, web hooks, and pre-integrated connectors to understand whether the new platform can efficiently communicate with the existing ones. Choosing an extensible platform will help you to support different business and pricing models in the future. 

NeeVista Recommends GoTransverse for Intelligent Billing

"Companies seeking sophisticated monetization and financial functionality beyond simple subscription should shortlist GoTransverse." — Andrew Dailey, Managing Director, MGI Research

While choosing an intelligent billing vendor, you are trying to solve multiple challenges and adhere to the best practices at the same time. It isn’t an easy feat, especially when you have so many intelligent billing vendors available online.

NeeVista consultants specialise in helping businesses choose the best automation platforms for varied needs, create custom integrations, and achieve performance efficiency by solving IT-related business challenges. With years of experience in helping different organisations across industries solve billing and invoicing challenges, they recommend GoTransverse as your go-to platform for intelligent billing, invoicing, and order-to-cash cycle automation. 

What Is GoTransverse?

GoTransverse is an intelligent cloud-based billing platform that is designed to handle sophisticated pricing, rating, and high volumes. Here is why reputed brands prefer GoTransverse for handling billing and invoicing:

• Sophisticated Monetisation: GoTransverse makes it seamless for you to integrate any data source and comes with the capability to automate limitless monetisation models. Its one-time, recurring, and usage-based pricing is what makes it the most preferred choice for an end-to-end monetisation platform among businesses of all sizes. 
   
• Enterprise SaaS Technology: If you are looking for time-to-value, agility, and lower cost-to-serve, GoTransverse will tick all of the boxes. With cutting-edge SaaS technology and extensible native cloud architecture, this platform can easily meet all enterprise needs.
   
• Features, Extensibility, and Add-ons: The GoTransverse intelligent billing platform also comes with multiple features such as product catalogue, payment, collections, accounts receivable sub-ledger, revenue recognition engine, and so on. In addition, their API-first application makes it super easy for you to connect existing systems and offer a seamless customer experience. 
   
• Domain Expertise: The GoTransverse team has deep expertise in billing, monetisation, and cloud technology. The best part is that they help you identify the best solution with delivery assurance, implementation, and customer success programs.

What Are the Features of GoTransverse?

The billing and monetisation solution of GoTransverse comes with the following features:

• Usage and Rating: The usage and rating feature helps you to handle limitless volumes as well as complex rules. With preset rules, it can automatically calculate charges and matches usage data to current subscribers in real-time.
   
• Product Catalogue: The product catalogue feature lets you create new products, manage existing ones, define discount rules, and set dependencies.
   
• Subscriptions: With this feature, you can easily design and automate subscription models for your business. This module is designed to support all sorts of subscriptions (monthly, daily, prepaid, tiered, trial, or any combination) in multiple currencies.
   
• Account Management: The account management feature acts as a central hub from where you can get details of accounts, payments, orders, credit/debit adjustments, custom payments, and so on. 
   
• Bill Calculation: Whether you want to calculate subscription fees, batch run bill cycle, test subscription model changes, or gain insights into revenue, you can do it all using the bill calculation module. 
   
• Invoicing: Besides enabling you to send accurate invoices on time, the invoicing feature makes it easy for you to act towards overdue invoices and prevent revenue leakage.
   
• Payments: Leverage different payment processing options (cards, ACH, checks, lockboxes, and more) using GoTransverse’s payments module. It comes with built-in fraud prevention mechanisms, failed payment retries, payment workflow actions, and more.
   
• General Ledger: The platform provides one or more accounts receivable sub-ledgers designed to automate entries from dynamic charging/billing, offer better forecasting, and provide cleaner audit trails. The system allows to get meaningful, accurate information for high volumes of transactions with a smart aggregation of general ledger transactions.
   
• Revenue Recognition: The revenue recognition feature makes it easier for you to identify earned revenue for any given time interval. This also allows you to set rules between customer charges and the general ledger for maximum visibility into revenue.
   
• Mediation: This add-on feature allows you to normalise, aggregate, and transform data collected in different formats, feed it into a rating engine, and create bills accordingly.
   
• Collections and Dunning: With this module, you can easily set up dunning strategies for past due accounts. In addition, you can also configure web service calls and offer deep provisioning to external systems.
   
• Tax: This feature helps you to calculate taxes based on preset customisable rates for specific markets.
   
• Bundles: Bundles allow you to create different order configuration combinations so that you can easily create simple subscriptions or multi-product orders.

GoTransverse Use Cases

Subscription Billing

• Flexible billing
• Subscription management
• Perfect packaging and pricing

Usage and Rating

• Allowances
• Tiers
• Tapers
• Multi-dimensional
• Sharing
• Time-based
• Pass-through

Mediation

• Configurable business rules
• End-to-end traceability
• High volume event processing
• Error detection and prevention

Revenue Recognition

• ASC 606 Compliant
• Revenue policy implementation

Quote-to-Cash Details

• Intelligent billing
• End-to-end automation (CRM, quote, order, invoice, collect, recognize, ERP connectors)

Collection and Dunning

• Preventing late invoices
• Payment retries and payment plans
• Integrated dunning plans and strategies

How Can NeeVista Help?

NeeVista consultants specialise in delivering end-to-end order-to-cash cycle automation with the help of deep expertise in the field of invoicing, billing, cloud infrastructure, and integrations. Improving your top-line efficiency and maximising customer satisfaction remain the ultimate goal of NeeVista. To help you achieve this, NeeVista offers vendor-agnostic consultation that is executed using a three-tiered structure. The first step is to understand the customer journeys, identify cash levers, define a vision, and map out the future customer journey with O2C automation technology. The next step involves delivering a minimum viable product with necessary integrations with existing systems. The final step is to enrich the solution based on feedback and make it operationally available to all stakeholders. 

Want to know more? Schedule a free, personalised consultation today!