Billing Automation: The Secret Solution for Finance Leaders Looking to Enable Hypergrowth

Most company CFOs today are having a tough time maximizing revenue and driving growth especially in a post-COVID world where curveballs are many. With increasing competition and new customer demands that have to be met to the point, improving operational efficiencies, and enhancing profitability are the perineal challenges.

So, what’s restricting finance leaders from reaching their goals? How can they scale their recurring revenue? What obstacles do they have to overcome to drive and sustain hypergrowth?

Growth challenges facing finance leaders

Managing recurring revenue and strengthening business performance is a tough job for any CFO and the challenges are just too many. The presence of several siloed legacy systems, the overreliance on manual labor, and poor integration between different business functions offer the perfect breeding ground for processing errors, revenue leakage, and loss of income.

As competition increases and as the duties of the CFO become more strategic, the pressure to increase profit margins and maximize the bottom line gets all the more intense. With CFOs required to do a lot more than just simple bookkeeping, budget planning, and financial reporting, the many challenges along this new, obstacle-laden path make it extremely difficult to drive growth. So, what are these challenges?

Enabling real-time visibility into project and financial information and efficiently measuring performance and profitability
Accurately assessing the true ROI while also controlling costs
Minimizing revenue leakage and tightening financial controls
Overcoming the errors caused by manual, paper-based tracking methods
Integrating data from a variety of spreadsheets and standalone applications used by geographically dispersed teams and customers
Accurately capturing expenses, including employee expenses, purchase orders, and other expense transactions

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The power of billing automation

Cash management and collection are extremely important and far more relevant in the cloud subscription era. Since annual and monthly deals have now replaced the one-time sales, to sustain, finance leaders need to scale, and that’s not possible if cash collection processes are manual. At the same time, for service providers and resellers, reconciliation is a major challenge. Even the slightest error in reconciling provider invoices can impact profitability while also causing revenue leakage.

In addition, since billing and invoicing are customer-facing functions, any error in the billing process can negatively impact the customer experience. Although subscription businesses are about landing new customers, it is also about ensuring as little churn as possible. There is a high chance that customers could turn profitable after an extended period. Therefore, billing and invoicing solutions should reduce friction, provide transparency, and deliver the best possible customer experience. Software or systems that aren’t built from the ground up to cater to recurring revenue and subscription models do not effectively aid in overcoming common challenges.

Billing automation solutions, on the other hand, are built specifically for subscription businesses. Finance leaders looking to drive hyper-growth need to move away from manual billing approaches and embrace the power of billing automation to ensure timely billing and collections. With the right solution in place, leaders can get greater control over the financial business, streamline operations, get better visibility with a built-in dashboard, and reports to efficiently manage recurring billing tasks.

Here are 5 ways in which billing automation can equip finance leaders for hypergrowth:

Enjoy better visibility

Modern billing automation solutions can provide much-needed visibility into business operations as well as customer and product profitability ensuring all outstanding charges are collected in time.

By breaking down the system and departmental barriers to automatically track time and expenses in the cloud, these solutions can streamline and automate the capture of all billable, and non-billable time, and expenses avoiding the possibility of revenue falling through the cracks. At the same time, leaders can also better understand the financial impact of their revenue decisions and always get insight into the “bigger picture”.

Manage complex billing terms and cycles

With modern customers demanding more flexible billing options, billing automation solutions can enable finance leaders to manage complex and personalized billing terms and cycles with ease.

Using automation, companies can cater to multiple billing methods, payment terms, schedules, and structures. They can also offer individual and consolidated invoices and more easily cope with the plethora of unusual billing demands without the risk of delays in invoicing and payment.

Reduce errors

Billing automation platforms also aid in automatically generating timely invoices, accelerating the invoicing cycle while also shortening time-to-cash. By eliminating the reliance on manual processes, finance leaders can minimize errors in the billing process while also improving finance productivity and profitability.

At the same time, flexible and automated billing schedules can help in improving the overall cash position without incurring the cost of additional resources.

Accurately project cash flows

Billing automation solutions can accurately pinpoint causes of revenue leakage, and aid in overcoming the cash flow management nightmare. Since service providers, resellers and vendors provide solutions and services at different times, there is a constant imbalance in cash outflows.

Billing automation can improve cash flow management via real-time visibility into key operational performance indicators. By allowing leaders to manage erratic cash flows more effectively, these solutions can deliver accurate insights into outstanding sales and future project costs and revenues.

Improve productivity

Manual processes and siloed spreadsheets are the primary reasons for lost revenue and costly productivity bottlenecks.

Billing automation can allow companies to decouple billing from revenue recognition either based on delivery milestones or pre-defined rules. Such capabilities make it easier for companies to track projects, efficiently recognize revenue, and support complex billing requirements thus enhancing staff productivity.

With companies constantly lacking real-time visibility into operations, creating realistic budgets, and successfully capturing the market share is a Herculean task. As today’s unpredictable and competitive business environment requires organizations to be as agile and adaptable as possible, CFOs need to be able to predict future disruptions and steer the business accordingly.

As a finance leader, you need to enable and empower your sales and revenue team to be creative in deal-structuring and ensure that your billing solution can support innovative financial agreements. Integrating features such as pricing indexation, billing in arrears vs. advance, flexible monthly, quarterly, or annual terms, integration with global accounting systems and payment gateways can allow your teams to have a more significant impact on business growth.

Embracing a modern, enterprise-grade billing automation solution is a great way to make strategically sound decisions to overcome the challenges of project delays, cost overruns, reduced profitability, and lost revenue opportunities.

A modern billing automation solution can not only deliver real-time visibility into revenue operations; it can also maximize profitability and client satisfaction helping to empower you with the capabilities you need to acquire more customers. With the right solution in place, your team can streamline the renewal process, and remove the burden on operational, sales, and customer success teams.

Improve the efficiency of your existing revenue streams and set foot on the path of hypergrowth today!

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