Your Billing Platform Determines Your Business’ Growth Curve

“Billing platform” might not be the sexiest buzzword thrown around the boardroom, but your billing platform determines how fast you can grow. The most innovative sales team and the flashiest of products will be handicapped by the limitations of your billing platform.

Are you ramping up to launch something new? Maybe you’re a seasoned veteran that knows there’s always one more thing you can do to optimize your business. Either way, this article is for you.

For modern billing platforms, these features are non-negotiable:

Here’s how you can tell if your team has one of the best tools in the industry for invoicing, accepting payments and chasing after accounts receivable.

Create estimates and invoices on any device.

You need cloud billing capabilities if you want to manage your accounts from anywhere. Modern encryption standards have proven that the cloud is a safe, reliable place to conduct business. Your employees and your customers expect on-demand access from all of their favorite devices - whether they’re in the office, at home or waiting for their next flight.

Automated consumption based billing.

Telecoms bill their customers based on real-time usage (minutes, units of data, messages etc.). Digital platforms sell licenses based on the number of end-users (seats). Gig economy workspaces bill based on usage time and total space used. All of these are variables that modern billing systems can instantly pull to generate accurate invoices.

Full-support for modern payment methods.

It’s been a decade since a programmer first purchased pizza using bitcoin. Banks are using blockchain to speed up international transactions. Telecommunications billing allows cellular service subscribers to bill their purchases to the cell phone bill.

Your payment processing solution needs to be able to handle a variety of payment methods. Customers want to quickly view their invoice and submit their payment in a way that’s convenient to them. If you force them to jump through hoops, their next jump will be to the competition.

Telecommunications Billing: Complexity is the New Normal

Have you ever looked at your landline, voip or cell phone bill? It contains line after line of usage details, government fees and rate plans. The product or service your offering right now may be more simple, but what if it becomes more complex?

Completing the purchase of a t-shirt online might not require the same capabilities of a telecom billing system. But what happens when you want to start offering volume discounts, or upsell your customers on different customization options?

Can your billing platform easily scale with your brand? Or, will adding more opportunities to generate revenue in each transaction mean that you need to dedicate a team member to manually configure a custom invoice? Having a fully automated billing platform that can handle usage-based billing, even if you don’t need it today, is critical for your company’s potential expansion tomorrow.

Remember that phone bill I mentioned a moment ago? Automated generation of complex invoices is just the start. How are you communicating these complex invoices to your customers? A complex looking invoice will generate follow-up calls to your customer service team.

The solution is what you’ll find in a telecom billing overview - it’s the first page on your phone bill. That first page provides an easy-to-read summary of what you’re asking the customer to pay you for.

It’s not enough to have a powerful billing system that can handle complex usage-based billing. It needs to be able to generate easy-to-read invoices for your customer. Modern billing platforms have the capability to generate complex bills that are easy for your customers to understand.

The bottom-line:

Your company, no matter its current size, needs a modern platform for generating invoices and collecting payments from your customers. It needs to be accessible from anywhere. The code under the hood should be easily configurable for automated billing - no matter how many variables it needs to consider. And your customers need to be able to quickly understand it and then easily make payments using their preferred method.

If your current billing platform fails at these goals, it’s going to hold back your growth. Investment in a system that meets today’s needs, as well as tomorrow’s means less headaches and faster growth.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.