What Should a Billing System Look Like from an IT Perspective

Billing Needs Flexibility, Bridging ERP And CRM

We recently had a great conversation with Igor Stenmark, the billing expert at MGI Research, and discussed the role of billing in a modern ICT environment. One thing became immediately clear: billing solutions nowadays need to be agile to adapt quickly to business changes, and therefore deserve their place in the ICT infrastructure. Read about Igor’s reasoning below.

Future-Proofing Your Architecture With An Agile Billing Platform

Modern organizations look beyond traditional monolithic ERP solutions and reap the benefits of easy integration. Since the introduction of the quote-to-cash, and later CPQ, there have been functional flows that overlap traditional CRM, ERP, and payment solutions. 

On top of that, ERP solutions are typically not equipped to deliver billing at a granular precision that is needed to quickly adapt to change. An Agile Billing Platform, where all elements are interconnected using microservices, overcomes a monolithic approach and supports your functional architecture, making it more effective and flexible.

Typical Problems And Key Areas To Look Into 

With new billing and monetization concepts, the need to integrate billing microservices and data increases.

For example, both billing and CPQ handle price books and product catalogs. This is a duplication prone to errors that can easily be integrated.

Another example is converged billing, where a variety of charges from various accounts that a customer might have, are combined. Currently, a lot of companies are looking into this field to support their clients. 

What Does A Good Billing System Need To Have?

According to Igor, 30-50% of the service inquiries are related to billing, which makes being able to present billing data a big deal. Offering self-service portals is a great start, but it all depends on your ability to derive the billing data. 

Agile systems such as Good Sign allow for monitoring cumulative billable revenue throughout the billing period by capturing billing events continuously. This way, you get insights into the revenue gap to close with full transparency, also in pay-per-use billing.

Tips And Tricks What To Look For In An Agile Billing Solution

If you decide to look at an Agile Billing solution, here are the tips Igor provides to his clients:

• Define your billing requirements not only for what you need now but also for your billing requirements 36-48 months out.
• Build a clear and concise set of use case scenarios that you can use to evaluate your potential suppliers.
• Get to know your potential suppliers to assess if there is a good fit,
  not just technical, but also operational, economical, and cultural. And ask for references early in the selection process.

Watch an on-demand webinar, where aspects of agile billing, subscription, and recurring revenue business transformation are discussed in a compact 15-minute session. Speakers are Igor Stenmark of MGI Research and Taija Engman of Good Sign. 

Watch now: 

It Perspectives to a Billing systems

Take Us To The Test!

Watch the on-demand webinar: It Perspectives to a billing system