5 ways Zone Billing can help your business
The most common NetSuite process that causes clients issues is billing and revenue recognition. Driven by business development ingenuity to increase revenue and customers’ demands, these processes are often complex and can be unique to your business. To get the most out of NetSuite in this area some customisation will likely help. Alternatively, there are a number of add on applications on the market such as Suite Billing, Zuora and Zone Billing.
Our post today will focus on Zone Billing which is a billing and revenue management application developed by Zone & Co. It is a NetSuite native application and can help to automate your NetSuite billing processes. Once NetSuite is integrated with your CRM or ecommerce website, the records contained in Zone Billing can be filled directly from those systems.
Here are some of the ways Zone Billing can benefit your business:
- Subscriptions Records – Zone Billing is based on subscription records which represents your customer contract. You will then create subscription items which are the components of your contracts that you will be billing your customer for. This will generate charges which become the line items on your invoices. All of this becomes the subscription plan. Standard subscription plans can be created streamlining subscription setups.
- Deal with complex entity hierarchies – Zone Billing uses combined billing profiles to allow you to combine line items from sales orders across different customers onto a single invoice record or breaking up fees from a contract across multiple bill-to entities. Combined billing profiles use a consolidated entity which is usually a parent company and map the lines/charges to the parent company. Consolidated billing also allows users to combine and separate billing lines based on item type and other features.
- Usage-based billing – Zone Billing makes it easy to capture usage data from your company’s website or proprietary platform. You can apply tiered pricing based on usage. Usage data can be loaded onto subscription records from CSV or via API. Zone billing also gives you the flexibility to bill based on count usage for example users, licenses or locations.
- Automate Renewals – Zone Billing contains built-in automate renewals functionality where it creates renewal estimates based on existing subscriptions. This functionality can be run manually or automated. Alternatively, you can sequence saved searches to automatically identify subscriptions that are ready to bill or renew and streamline this process.
- Automate revenue recognition – NetSuite accounting preferences allow you to automate your revenue arrangements. Zone billing allows you to update revenue details which runs off a search of active subscriptions. It allows you to insert review steps in the process if you want to put checks in place before revenue hits your profit and loss.
Case Study
We recently worked with a client implementing Zone Billing to streamline its billing and RevRec process. The client had a cumbersome OTC process due to the following issues:
1. There was a very complicated customer hierarchy comprising of accounts and billing entities. There was little consistency in how billing entities were used with BDs focus being on the account level. Sometimes billing would need to happen across billing entity customers at the account level and other times simply at the billing entity level.
2. Clients had demanded complicated and inconsistent billing schedules. All of this was fed from Salesforcehowever sometimes there were changes to billing scheduled
Based on these characteristics, the billing process was manual and took lots of time for the accounts receivable team. When implementing NetSuite they have implemented NetSuite Advanced Revenue Management, however, this didn’t help with their specific requirements.
Zone Advanced Billing allowed them more flexibility to bill between billing entities and account-level customers. This allowed them to leave salesforce processes relatively unchanged and eliminate finance billing workarounds. Zone Billing also gave them more flexibility with billing schedules.
If you are having issues with your billing processes get in touch and we can help you devise a solution saving your time and helping to improve cash flow.
