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.

A seamless payment runs process is an integral part of a subscription company’s collections lifecycle. While this may seem like a painless operation, it is no easy task for a business with millions of customers. Let’s take a B2C company that serves half of the total population (580 million) in North America. If every subscriber pays monthly, but not on the same day, this company would need to process 580 million x 50% ÷ 30 days ≈ 10 million payments on a daily basis. As the subscription economy matures and billing becomes more complex, this is where the value of Zuora’s recent upgrade in high volume payment processing power comes into play.

The Zuora engineering team has increased the maximum payment processing throughput by 100x up to 250 transactions per second (TPS) for payment runs and Zuora Collect. Zuora’s R&D engineers constantly evaluate customers’ payment run patterns to determine when and how their collections process can be improved. Our engineers quickly identified 84 customers that had payment runs taking longer than 1 hour and increased throughput to create a more efficient payment run cycle that finishes faster.

We monitor the payment run patterns of all our customers on a regular basis, and if we see a long payment run (> 1 hour) with a majority of its payment run time spent on calling a third-party payment gateway, and a gateway that can support concurrent payment calls from Zuora, we will enable this new high volume payments feature for them! This will not require any work on the customer’s end.

This new high volume processing capability significantly increases operational efficiency for a customer’s invoice payment operation process. Here are a few of the benefits:

• More timely payments and reduced Day Sales Outstanding (DSO)
• Reduced delay of overdue accounts by running payment processing during the most optimal time window in order to compete for limited funds in the subscriber’s wallet against other expenses
• Meet legal obligations of collecting payments on the exact day written on their customer contract, like the first day of the month

This creates a robust payment runs process for Zuora customers that can efficiently adapt to an increasing volume in processing needs as they scale.

Want to read more Notes from the Lab? Check out how we made 10x faster bill run times here.