Why Excel Is the Snake in Your Billing Paradise

Excel Is Everywhere, And For The Right Reasons

As a finance professional, you will probably spend a generous amount of time using Microsoft Excel, especially to collect data and to prepare and consolidate for billing cycles. And you are not the only one, since Excel is one of the most popular and widely used tools Microsoft has to offer. It’s a quick, reliable, and efficient way to fill the gaps between different systems, much needed, especially when billing services and data come from different source systems. But it is also a key signal that your systems no longer keep up with your billing needs. Let us explain why. 

The Pledge To Minimize Excel

Many organizations, especially corporations try to minimize Excel usage in their core processes. In their view, Excel files are inefficiencies and workarounds to problems that need to be solved at the root. There is also a control, liability, and transparency risk in terms of how the formulas are defined, who owns the content of the excel, how can the numbers be reconciled during for example an audit?

In general, it is viewed as an ever-growing sub-solution that with today’s agile systems is no longer needed. Especially in agile service billing, which is our domain, we see a lot of excel files of processes that really belong to be part of your agile billing system.

Rapidly Changing Business Versus Rigid Billing:

Here Is Where Excel Becomes Very Tempting

Since your billing platform was implemented, your business has probably drastically changed, new products and services have been introduced to fit your client needs, and contracts might have elements that have been added during the negotiations. As the billing professional, you feel you are trying to put the square peg in the round hole. Quickly, your Excel file will expand to fill all the gaps and transform from a quick turnaround to an essential part of your billing cycle. This is a sure sign that your billing needs beyond your current system, and the gap will only increase over time as we move into servitization, IoT-driven billing, pay-per-use models etcetera.

Real Business Benefits In Setting Up An Agile Billing System

People often see the billing platform as a cost, but a good billing platform actually saves you money. 

5 things that you could achieve with an intelligent billing platform 

1. Eliminated manual work (90%)
2. Faster billing (98%)
3. Improved cash flow (70%)
4. Higher revenues (10%)
5. Fewer customer complaints (50%)

You might be surprised to learn that billing automation will increase revenues. With a good billing system, you will not miss a billing item because you have all data correct and in time in your system, and you will not miss used volumes in your monthly billing cycle. 

Bill Agile, Monetize Based On Data, And Introduce New Business Models

Imagine a billing system that is flexible to meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs. An agile billing solution that always puts your contracts in the spotlight. Once your contract is put in the system, executing on it is easy. As you cover all elements, you can also use the system to develop new business models bases on your billing data, and rest assured the models as profitable and executable. Just think of the endless monetization possibilities you have if you can capture all your contracts in an agile system. Only then the promise of a new (service) business can be fully fulfilled.

Take Us To The Test!

If you want to capture new business opportunities and you feel your future billing needs will outgrow your current billing solution, or if you are just curious to learn how Good Sign does things differently, feel free to take us to the test! We will gladly take on your challenge and prove to you it can be done, and that the new world lies beyond your billing excel sheet.

Sources:

1 https://www.goodsignsolutions.com/blog/is-excel-the-worlds-most-commonly-used-billing-tool-the-best

2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-using-excel-finance-chiefs-tell-staffs-1511346601

3 https://irishtechnews.ie/seven-reasons-why-excel-is-still-used-by-half-a-billion-people-worldwide/

Good Sign

We help our customers solve existing pain points in monetizing service contracts and managing subscriptions and pay-per-use services. We help companies freely grow scalable services.

Feel free to contact us and let’s have a chat on how we can support your company.