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Zuora, which makes cloud-based business management software and firmly believes that the world will someday run on a “subscription economy,” released its Spring ‘18 product lineup at its sixth annual Subscribed user conference in San Francisco.
Zuora staged its initial public offering on April 12 and is just getting its bearings as a publicly traded company.
Zuora Central is an intelligent hub that sits between ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management). Neither of those technologies was originally designed to handle the operational and financial implications associated with subscription business models.
Zuora Central enables any company to manage its complex, recurring and hybrid revenue business models in one dashboard, in real time. Zuora Central integrates six essential order-to-cash engines that power the real-time updates across Zuora’s product portfolio (Zuora Billing, Zuora RevPro, Zuora Collect, Zuora CPQ, and Zuora Insights), third-party applications and the more than 100 apps in the Zuora Connect Marketplace.
Finance teams especially are under heavy pressure to support the growth of their businesses. The Deloitte 2018 Q1 North American CFO Signals report found that CFOs indicate a strong bias toward revenue growth over cost reduction (64 percent vs. 18 percent). Yet 41 percent of CFOs said staying current with changing technology is the greatest pressure facing their accounting and finance teams, according to the Robert Half Management Resources survey.
The Zuora Spring ‘18 release enables the CFO to be a critical driver of growth with the first and only complete subscription order-to-revenue solution on the market. Zuora has built new capabilities for the finance and operations team of the future, including billing, collections, revenue accounting, deal desk, orders and CXOs.
Subscription Order Management Designed for Customer Expansion
For a typical subscription business, around 70 percent of revenue comes from the existing customer base through renewals, upsells and cross sells. This Zuora Central Platform upgrade allows finance and operation teams to more easily process and capture these subscription change orders. New features include:
- Capture Expansion Upfront: Rapidly growing sales teams can book multi-year expansion contracts upfront.
- Increase Subscription Orders Flexibility: Capture complex changes for existing subscriptions, including multi-subscription and multi-site scenarios.
- One Place for Order Metrics: Out-of-the-box change order metrics such as Monthly Recurring Revenue, Churn Rate, Net Retention are visualized on a configurable dashboard.
- Automate Order-to-Revenue: Comprehensive change order data is captured to recognize revenue under ASC 606 compliance.
New Workflow Builder Brings Greater Platform Automation
A new Workflow service in the Central platform gives teams greater efficiency and flexibility for account management, provisioning, invoice management, and other business processes.
- Easily Customize: Easy, drag-and-drop workflow builder.
- Automate Everything: Using conditional logic and rules to tailor each workflow.
- Reduce Custom Code: Integrate quickly to other systems without custom code.
Zuora Collect, now Generally Available, Maximizes Recurring Payments
Zuora Collect helps collections teams reduce revenue leakage and involuntary churn caused by ineffective collections processes for recurring payments.
- Collect More: Maximize chances of collections success with a self-service web portal and multiple payment method options per subscription.
- Minimize Churn: Mitigate involuntary churn with intelligent retry logic for electronic payments.
- Reduce Costs: Maximize automation to handle recurring collections with configurable business workflows and a centralized collections workbench
Zuora RevPro UI Designed for Greater Revenue Automation
Zuora RevPro enables businesses to automate revenue recognition.
- Better Performance: Improved system speed for task rendering and data loading, resulting in a more pleasant user experience.
- Seamless Navigation: New intuitive design allows users to navigate more easily.
- New and Optimized Reporting: A new configurable dashboard, faster load times, data grids with advanced filtering, no export limits and drill-down capabilities.
New Capabilities for Invoice Settlement
New capabilities gives greater control throughout the entire AR process.
- Manage Payment Operations: Process payment applications and unapplied payments the way customers demand.
- Align with Accounting Mechanisms: Correct, adjust and manage account balances with credit and debit memos.
- Gain Greater Control: Granular reporting and accounting for AR settlement activity with line item settlement
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