How Large Enterprises Solve Complex B2B Billing at Scale

Some basic facts:

Every company, regardless of type, industry demographic or location, needs to bring revenue in the door.

Every company across the globe also needs billing to be set up correctly.

How should a proper billing setup look in an enterprise?

With a focus on large-scale business-to-business (B2B) billing, this setup had a very linear look some years back. A to B to C to D to E to F

1. Design a widget
2. Build it
3. Sell it
4. Invoice for it
5. Collect the money for it
6. Recognize the revenue for it

That linear layout looks much different for many large corporations these days with the shift to a subscription business model or some hybrid with both traditional and subscription billing needs.

Billing setups today require consideration of these and other elements:

1. Start and end dates
2. Upgrades and downgrades
3. Usage billing and data mediation (for examples, billing off an IoT sensor)
4. Pause and resume subscriptions
5. Renewals and evergreens

The difficulty for most large firms is that the pillar systems upon which these mammoth organizations are run, a CRP and ERP, can’t handle these elements. And, unfortunately, most business leaders don’t find that out until it’s too late.

Let’s look a bit deeper at the makeup of today’s enterprise.

• There’s the ‘front office,’ the domain of a CRM (think Salesforce) which is built for opportunity creation, CPQ and quote generation, resulting in an order.
• There’s the ‘back office,’ where an ERP resides and handles financials and traditional invoicing (see the linear B2B billing setup above).

Your billing process should not reside in the front office CRM, which is a sales process and keeper of sensitive financial details. How about as a bolt-on to the CRM? That’s a long-term recipe for disaster. Think implementation fatigue, budget resistance and connectivity complications that come from a non-seamless integration.

Your company’s invoicing is best closer to the back office in the ERP. As a finance process, this should be considered the most secure location and home to your company’s most accurate customer data. The problem is an ERP doesn’t know how to handle the concept of time when it comes to invoicing, a critical component with SaaS services.

In order to resolve this, you would need something to connect the CRM and ERP which can handle both traditional and subscription billing. 

This is where the concept of the middle office comes into play for today’s enterprise.

• The middle office, situated just as you’d imagine between the CRP and ERP, is the domain of order-to-cash platforms such as RecVue, enabling full-fledged enterprise capabilities.

With this type of solution, any type of billing is within your reach, including:

One-time billing (traditional)

Recurring billing (subscription)

Usage-based billing

Professional services

Envision all of those elements on a single invoice with the option to reference either a single contract or multiple contracts and amendments, all without manual intervention.

Consider the scenario facing World Wide Technology (WWT), a technology solution provider challenged with customer invoicing delays of up to four months due to an unwieldy combination of manually collected usage data, multiple layers of internal validation and contract review by hand. Using RecVue’s monetization platform, WWT was able to automate contracts, collect and mediate usage data and deploy agile billing - and shave 94% off its time-to-invoice, from 120 days down to 1-3 days. 

Or take the example of an iconic brand such as Hertz, the global car rental firm faced with the challenge of consolidating operations among a network of more than 44,000 global locations handling 4.5M rental agreements and invoices per month across 100,000 pricing rules. RecVue helped Hertz consolidate billing and compensation into a single system of record, in the process offering increased visibility into millions of rental agreements and commissions transactions, reduced operational inefficiencies and significantly improved auditability and control.

Large enterprises require the ability to handle this level of complexity to the tune of hundreds of millions, nay billions of dollars. The RecVue solution was designed to operate, and automate, at this scale. The platform handles hundreds of millions of transactions per month and billions in invoice throughput.

Contact us today to learn more about how RecVue’s order-to-cash solutions can help your large enterprise scale to the current billing needs.