Softrax - Complex Billing for SaaS and BPO

www.softrax.com/solutions/complex-billing/ Softrax Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise billing and revenue management solutions, today announced the immediate availability of a white paper entitled, "Billing Strategies for Innovative Business Models: How Boring Old Billing Could be the Competitive Advantage You Never Knew You Had." The paper examines the very complex billing requirements of a range of businesses -- including business process outsourcing (BPO), Software as a Service (SaaS), information providers, e-learning and research, e-commerce and Internet, high tech, telecom, utilities, and other business services.

"Companies that rely on business model innovation to drive growth have unique billing requirements," said Gottfried Sehringer, Softrax Vice President of Marketing. "Their billing systems must continually adapt to new ways of bundling, pricing, and charging. Companies that manage billing and related financial processes as an integrated strategic asset are able to go to market faster, increase market share, and outmaneuver their competition. This white paper discusses how to manage billing -- and the financial infrastructure -- as a strategic asset capable of continually delivering competitive advantage."

For companies with periodically recurring contracts, subscriptions and complex services, there are a number of mission-critical financial processes that must be optimized and integrated in order to produce a competitive billing system. These processes, which are examined in this paper, include:

* Contract Management
* Pricing
* Metering
* Billing
* Revenue Management

Checklists within each of these sections help readers rapidly access where to start, and how far they have to go in order to make billing a competitive asset. The paper is available for download free of charge from http://www.softrax.com/billing

Extract: The real key to implementing a sophisticated billing solution for SaaS is how tightly integrated it is with the current terms of your customer agreements. Contracts are the source for all the terms that govern how you bill your customers, track expenses and how you recognize the revenue you’ve earned. Softrax was specifically designed to seamlessly integrate robust billing functionality with Billing Strategies White Paper in-depth information about contracts and related records. This ensures your billing activity is always synchronized with the latest changes and amendments to a contract’s key elements. Softrax automatically generates billing schedules and manages transactions over the life of a customer relationship. Softrax also handles miscellaneous charges and contract changes that occur during a billing cycle with ease, and creates associated matching expenses, such as royalties, commissions, and unit costs to these items.

Solution highlights

Powerful and flexible functionality gives you total control over subscription, transaction and usage billing models

* Consolidate multiple charges into a single bill
* Manage simple and complex billing schedules
* Multiple, customizable formats for bill presentation
* Automatically split bills across multiple bill-to-addresses
* Distribute charges across multiple services
* Control discount activity on individual services

Manage Royalties, Commissions, and other additional expenses

* Create expenses based on percentages, fixed amounts, and unit rates
* Define the period over which an expense should be calculated
* Setup multiple expenses for each charge
* Automatically assign expenses to vendors, sales people, and products

Customize Billing to Your Customers’ Needs

* Easily manage prepayments:
o Ensure proper application of a prepayment against a contract
o Link prepayments to any associated services on the contract
o Create revenue schedules for prepayment
o Review, credit, and cancel prepayments

Revenue Accounting and Revenue Management

* Independently manage billing and revenue schedules
* Fully control revenue and expense general ledger account distribution at the time of contract creation
* Track unbilled and invoiced revenue and receivables activity
* Account for complex adjustments
* Automate journal entries for every billing and service activation event
* Simplify compliance with complex accounting standards

Sophisticated Pricing Models

* Easy rate table creation and ongoing modification
* Support for tiered volume discounts
* Easily implement variable pricing bands over the life of a contract
* Visibility into how time-dependent pricing affects future account profitability