Automation in Billing Never More Critical

“Continuity of remote work, supply-chain breakdowns, increased business failures, and a spike in security disasters impacted 2021 revenue and impelled mass migration to cloud services.”

This statement from the Top Ten Predictions for 2022 report from Nucleus Research succinctly sums up the year that was, from a business standpoint, as a jumping-off point for what’s in front of us.

The first of those predictions?

Increasing automation at all levels of business

“Going forward, more generalizable workflow automation capabilities and solutions will roll out, and more customers will begin leveraging the capability at scale. Large-scale platform vendors like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle and AWS heavily invest in RPA (robotic process automation) and workflow automation technologies,” according to Nucleus, a global provider of ROI-focused technology research and advisory services.

They’re not wrong.

Automating as many traditional business processes and tasks as possible can free up both time and resources to be repositioned elsewhere for more strategic purposes, and nowhere is that more valuable than finance. 

And digging deeper, nowhere is automation more potentially powerful within finance than in billing.

Automating traditional billing processes is certain to produce a number of benefits. Let’s consider four:

1. Cross-functional insights: By automating billing processes and systems as part of a larger effort to integrate with systems and processes in other corners of an organization - for example, marketing, supply chain, human resources and sales - leadership within each of these individual segments of a business now have the capability and power to cross-share consistent, accurate data with confidence.
2. Risk assessment: This access to more accurate, frequent and transparent information through an organization means finance executives are able to run billing scenarios with different sets of variables to better assess potential risks in existing markets and opportunities in those yet to be tapped.
3. New KPI development: By automating the standard tasks involved in billing processes and other finance functions, a company has at its virtual fingertips the ability to look beyond traditional metrics and consider more forward-facing KPIs, such as customer satisfaction or data capital. Automation has the power to open up a whole new world in terms of KPI opportunities through the availability of information necessary for successful integration and continuity. As the Nucleus report noted, “One of the main challenges regarding AI and its feasibility in the enterprise is its need for massive amounts of relevant, accurately formatted data to train a model to perform a specific task.” 
4. Global expansion enablement: Automated billing fosters the flow of all corporate finance functions to comply with regulations in different countries, provide multi-language and multi-currency support, and automatically support accounts from local subsidiaries.

Enabling an organization’s finance team to devote significant time and energy toward a more big-picture view of the business as a catalyst for competitive advantage is the ultimate end goal for any corporation. The ability to do that begins with billing automation.

To hear more about the most critical components for a successful digital billing experience, please join our webinar, “Develop Billing into a Value Adding Customer Experience,” on March 10th. This hour-long program, presented by Chris Sanders Consultancy, will examine, through real-life examples, how ‘volume billers’ drive value through flexibility, controls, data-mining and highly developed self-service billing experiences..

Click below to reserve your spot today!