Zuora’s engineering team is excited to share Notes from the Lab, where we talk about new functionality and improvements that will enhance the customer experience.

Billing is an important, often underappreciated part of your customer experience. Accuracy and timeliness are paramount. When billing processes go smoothly, nobody notices. When things go wrong, ongoing challenges can eat into your organization’s efficiency and impact customer relationships.

Zuora’s engineering team closely monitors customer bill run performance and are always looking for ways to optimize customer billing processes. Our customers have complex billing needs to support the multitude of preferences demanded by their customers for how and when they’ve agreed to pay for services. Zuora bill runs are built in an extensible way that encapsulates multiple billing processes, such as charge rate calculation, tax calculation, and subscription renewal into a one-click process.

Zuora recently introduced faster bill run times for customers that have bill runs taking longer than four hours. In some cases, volume had grown so much, bill runs were taking hours to process. Customers were splitting up bill runs into batches to optimize for speed. We set out to help customers improve the efficiency of their billing operation so we introduced a new process that analyzes tenant billing data and applies smart optimization. As a result, customers are now seeing 40-95% reduction in the time it takes to complete a bill run.

Here are just a few examples of the kinds of greater billing efficiencies that are customers are seeing:

• For a major global streaming service with millions of subscribers, bill run performance increased to a capacity of 3,000,000 invoices per hour.
• Bill run time was reduced from 10 hours to just one hour by an online directory service used by 35 million people to contact, vet and verify people.
• The world’s leading video communications provider saw bill run time decrease 80% from 5 hours to one hour due to optimizations on how renewals are handled.

For subscription businesses with millions of subscribers, resellers with multiple subscriptions per account, and companies leveraging renewals within the bill run, these improvements can help a billing operations team gain a lot more efficiency.

These efficiency improvements include:

• Reduce the value of overdue accounts
• Reduce billing delays and ensure faster collection time
• Eliminate the need to run multiple bill runs
• Reduce errors and the need to babysit batches
• Allow for more time to perform invoice validation processes

All of this adds up to a more efficient billing operation for Zuora customers, helping them deliver on the unique billing needs for their customers at-scale, while getting paid accurately and faster.

See how Zuora Billing can help you simplify your billing processes. Talk to a Zuora sales team member today!