“This Quarter we've turbo-charged Z-Billing. Bill runs are faster than ever before.”
andy woods, Product Manager
Billing
Rating and Billing Engine
Performance Improvements
Zuora continues its unparalleled commitment to customer success with ongoing investments in performance and scalability. In this release Zuora has made several application and infrastructure changes that will provide material improvements to bill run processing times. Customers can expect 30% to 50% improvements, on average, in bill run processing times with significantly larger improvements in many cases.
Configurable Refund Categorization
Configurable reason codes will allow Zuora customers to easily differentiate between the various reasons why refunds occur, especially "offline" exceptions on payments, such as failed ACH/direct debit payments, chargebacks, and disputes. Customers can tailor these codes to meet their unique reporting and business process requirements.
Enhanced User Activity Insight
Zuora has made it easier for administrators to rapidly audit login recency for all users within their Zuora tenants, thereby providing greater visibility into user application activity.
Over 10 Customer Requests Addressed
Zuora is committed to delivering products that best meet customer needs and has incorporated over 10 requests taken from its customer community directly into the application. Highlights include enabling bulk quote item updates to better support high-volume businesses using salesforce.com; syncing all payment methods (credit card and otherwise) to salesforce.com; improved user experience for account management functions within the Zuora user interface; and new payment and gateway processing automation enhancements.
Extensions to Payment Refund Capabilities
Use refund reason codes to send email notifications automatically when payment refunds or credit balance refunds are processed. You can also enerate automated API calls to external systems when payment refunds or credit balance refunds are processed. This capability enables merchants to trigger processes and workflow in external systems that are impacted by refunds.
Commerce
Clicks, Not Code: UK Direct Debit Via the Web
Zuora provides point and click tools for users to generate PCI compliant payment method capture iFrames that can be embedded in e-commerce sites. Zuora is adding UK direct debit as an additional payment option for user-configured self-service iFrames. This is in addition to the existing capabilities Zuora offers for accepting UK direct debit payments through the Zuora API and the Zuora user interface.
Refunds Visibility in Z-Force
Zuora continues to extend its leadership position with continued investments in Z-Force, Zuora’s native salesforce application. Z-Force customers already enjoy the benefits of seeing Zuora subscription billing and payment information in salesforce,com. With this release Z-Force customers now have visibility into refunds via salesforce.com.
“Z-Finance rings in the holidays with A/R Aging and Revenue Recognition Reports”
john banks, Product Manager
Commerce
Z-Force 360 Payments Sync
Payment Sync provides the ability to view and report on payment information directly in Salesforce at the Account level. This includes payment amount, status, payment method information, as well as data from the payment-to-invoice relationship, including invoice amount and refund amount applied by a payment, providing the visibility that Sales and Customer Service users need.
Automatic Restart Support for Sync
If you use Z-Force Quotes to create subscriptions in Zuora, our new On-Demand Sync allow you to sync newly created subscriptions and billing data back into Salesforce whenever you want. This means you no longer have to wait for a scheduled sync before your users can see the subscription and billing data in Salesforce. Additionally, if you use Order Builder to create Products in Zuora, you can also sync them back into Salesforce with On-Demand Sync.
Billing
Automatic Price Update from Product Catalog Pricing on Subscription Renewal
Pricing strategy changes in made in the product catalog are automatically reflected in subscriptions as they renew. The ability to change subscriber pricing to whatever the current charge pricing is in the product catalog at the time of subscription renewal. This enhancement augments our current ability to uplift prices upon renewal by a fixed percentage.
Qvalent QuickGateway Credit Card Support
Australia and New Zealand domiciled customers can now accept Visa, Mastercard and Amex credit cards, via QuickGateway, with a Westpac Bank merchant account.
Finance
Accounting Close Aging Balance
With accounting close aging balances, you can do accurate balance sheet reporting and bad debt management. Now you have the ability to access summary and detailed level aging balances, as of the close date of an accounting period, organized by aging buckets specific to your business.
Pre-Built Revenue Recognition Rules
Z-Finance lets you recognize revenue with pre-built revenue recognition rules. Whether you want to recognize usage revenue upon invoicing, or spread recurring revenue over time, we have you covered.
Deferred Revenue Reports
Your finance team can use this reports package to easily manage revenue recognition. We now provide you with a package of 3 reports that reveals earned and deferred revenue schedules by month.
“More great features to help you GROW, FLOW and KNOW your subscription business.”
ben wu, Product Manager
Commerce
Amendments for Evergreen Subscriptions
Creation of Amendments through Z-Quotes is no longer limited to termed subscriptions, and instead, can also be created for evergreen subscriptions.
This provides Z-Quotes users the ability to process change orders for evergreen subscriptions directly in Salesforce.
Support for Termed Subscriptions in Z-Checkout
With support for termed subscriptions, hosted subscribe pages are no longer limited to creating evergreen subscriptions, but can instead, create termed subscriptions, thus offering more flexibility in the types of subscribe pages that can now be created.
Billing
Z-Tax adds inclusive tax approach
This enhancement should be particularly beneficial for merchants in Europe, Australia and New Zealand that use a tax inclusive approach, because it enables prices to be quoted to subscribers with value-added tax included, rather than adding taxes to prices after the fact.
Individual Usage Rating
Zuora typically sums customer usage records together and rates them once in aggregate. With this enhancement, Zuora can now rate usage records individually within customer invoices, which is valuable for businesses -- in telco, cloud, or any other industry -- where subscribers need to see usage charges itemized.
Finance
Accounting Periods
You can create accounting periods in Zuora to match your financial periods. This allows you to align all transactions to your accounting periods, and shows you how your business performed across multiple accounting periods.
Trial Balance
You can run a trial balance and have your Billing and Cash data summarized at any time. Z-Finance will also summarize all pending transactions for the period to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. You can also lock and close an accounting period to ensure no more changes occur.
“This Quarter's new features are all about being better, faster, stronger.”
andy woods, Product Manager
Billing
Bill “Runs” are now Bill “Sprints”
Get paid faster than ever before. Bill Run generation time has been reduced by as much as 90%. You will notice the billing run details show fewer accounts being processed than before. For example, if there are 100,000 accounts in the batch that is being processed, the number of accounts processed might show only 200, if only those 200 accounts are eligible to be processed on that day.
Align Billing with Your Org Structure
Billing now supports the complexities of your organization more than ever before. Now you can create a hierarchy of billing accounts to match your organization. For example, if you offer subscription services via different subsidiaries, hierarchies let you bill on behalf of the parent, subsidiary, or even your subsidiary’s sub. Additionally, you can transfer ownership of invoices when your organization grows and new roles are created.
Finance
Get Smarter with Improved AR Reporting
Enjoy improved usability and performance of your AR Summaries. We updated the AR Summary reporting interface to match the functionality of the Exports report interface. Also, Zuora now generates the AR Summary report as an asynchronous process to improve performance.
Wait, There's an Encore!
This is only a snippet of our new features and product enhancements released over the past quarter. For a complete overview, please visit our Knowledge Center today.
Next Steps
Zuora Demo
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Zuora Resources
Subscription Management Resources.
