An ideal time to overhaul your organisation’s billing system
A revenue management solution that can evolve and grow with your business is fast becoming critical foundation technology.
Is FY 2024 the year when you’ll iron out your billing and invoicing issues, for good and all? For many Australian organisations, the answer to that question is won’t, but should, be a resounding yes.
Although local businesses have embraced digital transformation with a vengeance in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis – the country’s total ICT spend is likely to exceed $117 billion in 2023, up 5.8 per cent on the previous year, according to Gartner – revenue management technology hasn’t necessarily been on top of the average corporate shopping list.
Increased spending on digital projects – many organisations are laser focused on improving their customer experience and optimising their supply chains – has been very much in evidence. But companies channelling money into technology enabling them to record and monitor sales of their products and services and generate timely, accurate invoices? Not so much.
Beyond billing
That’s a shame and it’s short-sighted, too. Today’s revenue management solutions are far more than mere backroom technology, necessary to keep operations ticking over and bills going out on time.
Smartly implemented, a revenue management solution can become a strategic digital asset, one that delivers full quote-to-cash support for whatever monetisation model you choose to put in place.
It can also be a key source of business intelligence, with the capacity to generate reports that lay open the customer journey. Doing so can enable you to gauge the success, or otherwise, of your various market offerings and make data driven decisions to enhance them.
It should also be possible to extract actionable insights that allow you to make some of your internal processes, such as new business development and debt recovery, more efficient.
And, ideally, it will integrate seamlessly with the ERP solution powering your business, be that SAP or Microsoft Dynamics, and the ecosystem of other financial solutions in your technology stack.
Assessing your requirements
Not sure if your existing revenue management system does all or any of those things? That’s not an uncommon state of affairs – particularly for larger established businesses that have grown and diversified over many years.
If this sounds like your organisation, your legacy billing solution is likely to have evolved over time, too. Extension modules may have been tacked on in response to emerging business needs, and various divisions across the enterprise may access the data the solution contains for their own operational purposes. The full gamut of functions it performs may be far from clear.
Consequently, upgrading to a new revenue management platform isn’t as simple as switching off the old and switching on the new. Rather, it pays to evaluate your core business needs, and the systems and processes you currently have in place, in order to identify the shortcomings of your current technology.
Achieving greater flexibility
There’s a good chance that when you do so, you’ll discover it’s not flexible enough to support innovation at speed – changes in the way you monetise your goods and services, for example, or a significant diversification of your offering.
Making modifications to that model or offering may call for significant ICT resources and take a considerable period of time to effect. That’s a far from ideal state of affairs, given the extraordinarily rapid pace of change that’s now the norm.
Businesses wanting to keep up need to be able to pivot on a sixpence, and those that can’t do so will inevitably find themselves losing mind and market share to their more agile competitors.
Enacting change can come by implementing a cloud-based revenue management platform that operates in a ‘low code’ environment. You’ll be able to test and implement new monetisation strategies quickly and economically, without having to call on an army of programmers and consultants.
Furthermore, you’ll be able to enhance and extend your revenue management environment with best of breed applications, provided you choose a solution that has fully published APIs and offers pre-configured connectors.
Time to act
Transforming your revenue management environment may not be the most ‘glamorous’ digitisation initiative your enterprise embarks on in the upcoming financial year but it’s likely to be one of the most important, and a critical determinant of success in what’s shaping up to be a challenging 12 months.
If it’s not on your high tech investment agenda, you’re overlooking a vital opportunity to strengthen your organisation’s position and prospects.
By Carl Warwick, Regional Sales Director Asia Pacific and Japan, BillingPlatform
