New Features
Every month Zuora releases a new set of functionality based on guidance from our customers.
August 2011
Link Accounts Through Customer Hierarchy
August's product release centers around the concept of enterprise billing - pushing our product to the max to further support the complexities behind large scale subscription billing. A pain point behind enterprise billing is organizing relationships within customer accounts -- from Owner to Subsidiary, Corporate to Department, or Customer to Sub-Customer. With Customer Hierarchy, you can now set up one customer account as the parent, then set each department or subsidiary as a child and to as many levels as you need. For example, customer CoreTech, actually has two regional subsidiaries, MetaTech and DataTech. When you create these new customer accounts, you have the option to connect this customer account to a parent account. And what's even better -- transactions from a child record can optionally be seen in the parent record for full view of all related records!
Generate Invoices Separately
For relationships within customer accounts, often there's a need to invoice jointly or separately. In August's release, each subscription can be set to generate it's own invoice, regardless of other subscriptions the customer may have billing in the same period. Lets say, a subscriber has a regular monthly invoice that is generated for a particular amount, but for a single month they have an add-on charge they want billed on the same day, on a separate invoice. With a simple check-box, this add-on charge will be invoiced separately so that it's clear to their AP department this charge is different from the normal monthly fee and not an increase overall.
Invoice Subscriptions to Different Accounts
Now that you can link parent and child accounts, you're now able to specify for each subscription which customer account owns the subscription, and which customer will be invoiced for it. For instance, subscriptions for all products or services can be owned by the specific departments using them, but all billed to a single corporate AP department. While not limited to accounts related via Customer Hierarchy, this feature allows MetaTech to own an individual subscription, however MetaTech's parent company, CoreTech, is the invoice owner and will receive all invoices for MetaTech directly.
Aggregate Usage Among Multiple Accounts on One Invoice
Another feature set to address pain points within parent-child relationships is the option to have a usage plan for the parent account where all the children accounts share a pool of minutes, data or other units of measure. Each child can have it's own usage records imported, however, there's a single subscription at the parent level that bills all the usage for the entire organization, taking into account any included units, tiered pricing or overage you've set up. For instance, CoreTech's child accounts, MetaTech and DataTech each have usage that is tracked individually. However, neither child account has a subscription for usage associated with it. Instead, CoreTech has a subscription that will bill usage for both child accounts and the parent account in a single line item of the invoice, directly to CoreTech.
Next Steps
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