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FinancialForce, a go-to cloud ERP provider on Salesforce.com, on Sept. 15 introduced FinancialForce Billing Central, which it claims is the only cloud application that unifies billing, revenue management and accounting operations on the Salesforce Platform.
Billing Central’s strengths include intuitive-to-use processes and enabling visibility across the entire customer lifecycle, the San Francisco-based company said.
New-generation businesses increasingly are shifting from product and single-transaction sales to service and subscription models. A recent industry survey reported that 70 percent of chief financial officers (CFOs) say that more than half of their revenue now comes from services, including professional services, subscription-based services, service-level agreements, managed services and usage-based contract.
More than one-fourth (28 percent) of the CFOs indicate that all of their companies’ 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, FinancialForce said.
Services Changing the Game in Customer Experience
At the same time, the shift to services and the importance of subscription renewals has placed an even greater emphasis on how customer experience and success impacts overall business growth and profitability.
The survey also revealed that about one-third of CFOs believe they should become more engaged in customer satisfaction, retention and renewals (34 percent) and more involved in product/service development (36 percent).
FinancialForce Billing Central sees itself as a direct response to these changing business models and takes control of multiple sources of revenue streams to help organizations manage it in one closed-looped billing process, the company said.
With Billing Central, FinancialForce said users will now be able to:
–consolidate billing sources across multiple customer contract types;
–support tier and volume-based pricing;
–benefit from the fact that the product is unified 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; and
–avoid duplication of data and objects in Salesforce CRM.
A Single Customer-Success Business Platform
Billing Central 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, the company said.