Write up a list of the most important things your employees spend time on. You know, the things that actually move your business forward, the core competencies you can perform better than anyone else.
Where do you think billing would be?
Billing is obviously crucial; it almost literally keeps the lights on. But it’s probably not the first thing that comes to mind as a really indispensable part of your operation.
That paradox — in which something is both completely necessary yet completely redundant — almost always leads to automation. The same is true for billing.
According to a recent report in ITProPortal, the worldwide market for SaaS tools is on track to hit $100 billion in 2020, and it is projected that more than one-fifth of Fortune 500 companies will have adopted a subscription model by that time. This means that automated billing systems are fast becoming much more of a necessity than a luxury.
Automated Billing Saves Time
Imagine being a company like Bay Alarm, the San Francisco-based subscription home security service. They have to bill hundreds of thousands of users, each with their own unique features, preferences, and options. And they have to bill each and every one of them monthly or quarterly.
Building a company at scale like that would be functionally impossible with an manual billing system. With the amount of time your employees would spend inputting subscriber information, mailing or emailing invoices, and running cards, there would be no time left over for operating a monitoring center and fleet of installer trucks to keep your clients secure.
Automated Billing Saves Money
And it’s not just time that companies lose with outdated systems, it’s also a lot of money. Of course, all those extra hours spent by your employees cost money. But there’s also the revenue you miss out on. Take something like Adobe Creative Suite. Were they stuck in the old days, the only workable system would be to bill their clients once annually, as opposed to every month. But many customers prefer monthly payments, even if the price is slightly higher. The price tag and commitment of annual billing would be enough to scare many clients off, costing Adobe serious lost revenue.
Automated Billing Saves Headaches
Look, people can build some great companies. The folks at Bay Alarm are good at developing great security systems, and Adobe is very good at digital design. But people are also fallible. Sometimes, we make mistakes. And when it comes to billing, mistakes can be extremely costly. If you forget to process a payment, process it late, process it with errors, or bill it to the wrong person, that means lost revenue. And your clients won’t be too happy about it either, if their service gets interrupted due to a mistake in billing. Billing errors can severely damage your brand reputation.
Let your people do what they’re good at! And let Chargent handle the other stuff. We’re uniquely built to handle automated recurring billing for SaaS or other types of services, organizing all your payment processing outputs — even from multiple payment gateways — right in Salesforce, where it’s easily accessible at the click of a button, and where your operations already live. Basically, we’ll manage all that subscription billing stuff, so you can focus on what it is that you’re good at.