FinancialForce Introduces Billing Central for Everything-as-a-Service Business Models

Cloud ERP provider FinancialForce has released FinancialForce Billing Central, the first cloud application that unifies billing, revenue management and accounting operations on the Salesforce Platform, building seamless processes and providing end-to-end visibility across the customer lifecycle. FinancialForce Billing Central brings organizations closer to their customers in an era of changing business models and complex customer relationships.

Modern businesses are increasingly shifting from product and single transaction sales to service and subscription models. A new survey from CFO Magazine has revealed that 70% of CFOs say more than half of their revenue now comes from services, which include professional services, subscription-based services, service-level agreements, managed services and usage-based contract. Almost one-third (28%) of the CFOs indicate all of their company’s revenues are services-related. Despite this major shift in business models, most ERP and billing systems haven’t kept pace and do not support modern customer engagement.

At the same time, the shift to services and the importance of subscription renewals have placed an even greater emphasis on how customer experience and success impact overall business growth and profitability. CFO Magazine also uncovered that approximately one-third of CFOs believe they should become more engaged in customer satisfaction, retention, and renewals (34%) and more involved in product/service development (36%).

FinancialForce Billing Central is a direct response to these changing business models and takes control of multiple sources of revenue to help organizations manage billing in one closed-looped process.

With Billing Central, FinancialForce customers will now be able to:

Consolidate billing sources across multiple customer contract types
Support tiered and volume-based pricing
Integrate with Salesforce CRM for 360-degree customer visibility
Visualize the entire customer lifecycle — from opportunity to renewal
Leverage real time cloud reporting for revenue and customer analytics
Gain full audit and control of revenue sources on one platform
Avoid duplication of data and objects in Salesforce CRM

A Single Customer Success Business Platform
Billing Central further enables businesses to benefit from a single cloud platform strategy and manage customer billing on the same platform that sales, services, customer support and customer success staff are using — for complete customer lifecycle visibility, from opportunity through to renewal. Operating from one platform provides a single source of business truth, improving accuracy and efficiency and reducing the dependence on costly integrations to make data available to other business applications. In addition, it allows organizations to anticipate and proactively manage customer renewal risks to better protect and predict recurring revenue streams.

“We live in an Everything-as-a-Service economy, and the enormous variability in a services economy needs more than just a system of record. Success depends on a system of intelligence,” said Ray Wang, Principal Analyst & Founder, Constellation Research. “Digital business models require a real-time view of everything from receivables, utilization, support ticketing, analytics and revenue recognition. It’s no longer about how great your sales pipeline looks, but rather whether your customers are happy and your renewal base is robust.”

“The new services economy has been growing at an astounding rate, and Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) is disrupting countless industries — from technology and applications, to goods and healthcare,” said Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce. “Yet, many cloud business systems don’t reflect this emerging business model, and require costly integrations with third party subscription billing apps and accounting solutions. The end result is a complex web of disconnected systems that replicate data and create additional headaches for the CFO. FinancialForce Billing Central enables subscription and usage-based billing from a single cloud platform and puts the customer at the very core of revenue management.”

“We see FinancialForce Billing Central as a big step forward in billing and centralized revenue management,” said Leo Mooij, Director of Operations and Back Office Systems at Raet. “As the Everything-as-a-Service trend continues to grow, we expect Billing Central will be a logical next step for companies that support usage billing and manage complex customer relationships.”