Orchestrate subscriptions efficiently
Indispensable prerequisites are a highly agile quotation process to meet constantly changing customer and market requirements, as well as automated accounts receivable accounting to the greatest possible extent, which balances customer accounts in real time.
Heilless overloaded
Subscriptions need to be simple yet flexible, easy to use yet high quality, and personalized yet offered at scale. This leads to a growing volume of increasingly complex transactions that complicate revenue recognition. Classic ERP systems are hopelessly overburdened if they are to settle multiple agreements that can be changed on a daily basis, for example, on a monthly basis with a single, simple and transparent invoice.
Zuora, a subscription management platform for subscriptions, products, and usage-based services, offers specially designed solution modules for this purpose that impress with their high flexibility. This eliminates time-consuming and costly programming of the numerous individual factual features of an agile subscription by IT service providers and replaces it with simple configuration and modeling that can be performed by product management. This makes companies more agile and faster and reduces the costs of the required IT solutions.
Zuora CPQ X (Configure, Price, Quote) is specifically designed to manage a wide variety of service terms and frequent changes that occur throughout the subscriber lifecycle. On average across all industries, this amounts to four changes per service per year. These include, for example, duration of service, temporary discounts and payment plans, upgrades, downgrades or the addition of new services. And, of course, with CPQ X you can also add singular services and products to the agile offering, because without this there would be no homogeneous management system for the most heterogeneous offering cuts.
Agile quotation
With Zuora CPQ X, sales teams can create quotes up to 35 percent faster. In doing so, the module ensures that both sales and finance teams can transparently support quotes and orders at all times throughout the subscriber lifecycle. Designed for a variety of terms with different offers required in any combination of subscriptions as well as usage-based and one-time offers, Zuora CPQ can, for example, natively increase ramp-up deals, apply discounts to future periods as well, or even extend the duration of a contract. Zuora CPQ is also configured to manage these agile order slices in a single contract as subscriptions change periodically.
However, the highly complex business processes of the subscription economy affect not only the preparation of offers, order management and invoicing, but also the collection and debit-side closing processes - from the posting of revenues to the fiscally correct balancing of user accounts. These tasks are also increasingly complex with agile subscriptions, are prone to human error with conventional approaches, and can drag on for weeks. With the Real-Time Revenue building block, companies can dramatically mitigate these critical expenses at the end of each financial period, as accounts can be automatically balanced on the first day of the period.
A new dashboard for the close process continuously reconciles revenue and immediately identifies and escalates any errors that need to be addressed. While traditional reporting produces stale data that can go back weeks, with Zuora's real-time revenue platform, new revenue analysis appears instantly and on a single page in real time. Based on this real-time data, much more accurate forecasts can be made and new revenue targets can be set and achieved.
In real time
Enhanced with CPQ X and Real-Time Revenue, the Zuora suite thus provides seamless real-time connectivity from quoting and customization to billing, receivables management and collections, revenue recognition and customer account balancing. As an integrated revenue recognition solution, it allows any combination of subscriptions, one-time purchases and usage-based services, making it easy for companies to manage all agile processes in real time.
