FinancialForce has unveiled a new cloud application that is designed to unify billing, revenue management, and accounting operations on the Salesforce Platform.
The Cloud ERP provider said that the FinancialForce Billing Central offering will help to build seamless processing and provide end-to-end visibility across the customer lifecycle, leading to a closer relationship with customers.
The hope is that the application will help to combat the challenges posed by changing business models and complex customer relationships.
There is also hope that the app will tap into an increasing shift from product and single transaction sales to service and subscription models. FinancialForce highlights a survey from CFO Magazine which reveals that 70% of CFOs see more than half of their revenue coming from services.
These services can include; professional, subscription-based, service-level agreements, managed services, and used-based contract.
Additionally, it was found that 28% of CFOs see all of their company’s revenues as services-related.
With this shift in business model comes an increased necessity to become more engaged in customer satisfaction, retention and renewals (34%), and more involved in product/service development (36%).
Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce, said: “The new services economy has been growing at an astounding rate, and Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) is disrupting countless industries – from technology and applications, to goods and healthcare.”
Despite this, many cloud business systems don’t reflect the emerging business model, and require costly integrations with third party subscription billing apps and accounting solutions, said the CEO.
“The end result is a complex web of disconnected systems that replicate data and create additional headaches for the CFO. FinancialForce Billing Central enables subscription and usage-based billing from a single cloud platform and puts the customer at the very core of revenue management,” said Roche.
The company said that the Billing Central application is in direct response to these changing models and aims to take control of multiple sources of revenue.
Customers will be able to consolidate billing sources across multiple customer contract types, support tiered and volume-based price, integrate with Salesforce CRM, visualise the customer lifecycle, use cloud reporting for revenue and customer analytics, and gain audit and control, the company said.
Ray Wang, Principal Analyst & Founder, Constellation Research, said: “We live in an Everything-as-a-Service economy, and the enormous variability in a services economy needs more than just a system of record. Success depends on a system of intelligence.
