CHAPTER 5
What Should You Look For In A Cloud-based Billing Solution?
After your business evaluates the capabilities of a potential billing solution, you still need to ensure that a certain baseline set of features are available. As a SaaS solution provider, your organization’s goals and pricing strategy may change over time, which is why you need access to a comprehensive solution.
Recurring billing
Your billing system should support billing, invoicing, and collection for recurring payments.
Usage-based billing
Your billing system should be able to deploy complex, usage-based pricing models for businesses and individual customers.
Pricing & rating
Your billing system should support functionality related to both fixed-price and rating-based payment models.
Usage collection & mediation
Your billing system should be able to collect usage-based payments and convert data types as necessary.
Configure, price, quote
Your billing system should support functionality related to both fixed-price and rating-based payment models.
Customer portal
Your billing system should be able to collect usage-based payments and convert data types as necessary.
Invoicing
Your billing system should support functionality related to both fixed-price and rating-based payment models.
Event-based invoicing
Your billing system should support multiple payment gateways and offer customers options around how they pay for the goods and services that they use.
Support for multiple payment gateways
Your billing system should support multiple payment gateways and offer customers options around how they pay for the goods and services that they use.
Integrations
Your billing system should integrate seamlessly with third-party providers without causing any disruption to existing billing operations.
APIs
Your billing system should come with APIs that can easily integrate with other core functions and applications.
Extensible data & user interface
Your billing system should be extensible and come with an easy-to-navigate user interface.
Web toolkit
Your billing system should contain advanced ability to customize data quickly to accommodate specific UI preferences
Workflow & automation
Your billing system should allow you to set predefined workflows and automate activities that would otherwise take significant time and energy to execute.
Localization
Your billing system should allow you to customize outgoing communications and invoices to customers based on their location or other unique characteristics.
Configurability & flexibility
Your billing system should be highly configurable and flexible in order to adapt to rapidly changing consumer preferences and disruptive payment models.
Compliance & security
Your billing system must comply with all regulatory requirements relevant to your business and come with a robust security capability.
User roles & access
Your billing system should support role-based access that allows unique customers to manage their own accounts.
Reports & dashboards
Your billing system should support in-depth reporting and provide customizable dashboards that clearly communicate important metrics about your customers.