NetSuite ERP SuiteBilling: Streamlining Revenue Management and Enhancing Customer Experience

Managing subscriptions, different prices, discounts, payment periods, and invoicing can be a lot for an account management team to tackle. Some find themselves tangled up with two, three, or more applications, trying to reconcile disparate figures and data. 

But with NetSuite SuiteBilling, you get a complete account management and billing solution that can automate several account management functions.

What Is NetSuite SuiteBilling?

NetSuite SuiteBilling enables users to automate their revenue management and billing systems, particularly for subscriptions. With this powerful NetSuite solution, organizations can create and manage subscriptions, as well as automatically generate invoices that reflect a number of conditions, unique subscriptions, or customers.

What Can NetSuite SuiteBilling Do?

SuiteBilling takes the brunt of subscription management and billing off the shoulders of your staff, automating even complex billing details and adjustments.

For example, suppose you run a SaaS company that provides facility management software. With your solution, customers can automatically activate appliances, HVAC systems, and electrical circuits in a building. You have 150 subscribers and different pricing tiers based on how many connections each subscriber has. For instance, one subscriber, Company A, may connect  five chillers, 23 heaters, and 22 electrical circuits, which would be 50 connections in all. Another client, a larger company, Company B, has 236 connections.

The first tier, 1 to 100 connections, costs $450 per month. The next tier, 101 to 250 connections, costs $800 per month. For subscribing for a minimum of two years, a customer gets a 10% discount. Company B calls you and says they want to subscribe for three years. Company A has a yearly subscription.

With SuiteBilling, the exact amount Company A and B have to pay automatically gets calculated for you. No need to manually hammer numbers into a calculator.

Now, suppose you want to further solidify Company B as a long-term customer, so you decide to offer them an additional “loyalty appreciation discount” of an extra 3%. With SuiteBilling, you can easily create a condition that automatically applies this discount. It also incorporates any adjustments into your invoicing and account management system.

If you want to compare the revenue generated by companies with longer subscriptions against those with shorter yet higher-grossing subscriptions, you can do so using filtering and charting tools in SuiteBilling.

Optimizing Revenue Management with SuiteBilling

With SuiteBilling, you get comprehensive billing and revenue recognition capabilities. You also get visibility into the health of your cash flow. To top it off, you have the power to streamline your invoicing and payment processes.

For example, instead of sifting through endless columns of numbers to figure out which companies are generating the most revenue for your company on a monthly basis, you can see who’s paying what in a matter of moments.

Also, you can adjust payment terms from one customer to another at any time. This allows you to customize the payment experience in a way that’s most convenient for your clients.

Automated Reporting and Forecasting

SuiteBilling also gives you the ability to automatically generate reports and make financial forecasts.

For example, imagine your company has clients in the U.S., Canada, France, and Spain. You’re considering hiring someone to manage the French and Spanish accounts, but you have no idea how much to pay them. You want to give them a base salary of $100,000 and a bonus based on a percentage of regional revenue. But how much would that equate to? You need to know before sitting down with HR to discuss the position’s details.

You can use filters in SuiteBilling to reveal how much revenue all your French and Spanish accounts bring in each month. You learn they generate an average of $120,000 each month, so you decide to offer a bonus of 0.7% a year. For a candidate, knowing they can grab another $10,080 a year may be the tipping point that makes them commit. But you can also enter a higher figure, such as 0.8%, during the negotiating process and see how that would impact their pay—without pulling out the calculator.

Improved Compliance with Accounting Standards

Ensuring your accounting practices align with standards can involve checking and double-checking what you do several times a week, but with SuiteBilling, this isn’t a problem. You can set up your system to align with internal or external accounting requirements once and then not worry about it as the days and weeks go by.

Of course, standards change. But you can quickly adjust your SuiteBilling settings to reflect updates and refinements. Then all your accounting systems get the same tweaks across your entire organization.

Augmenting Customer Experience with SuiteBilling

SuiteBilling also provides a better experience for those on the other side of the table, your customers, because it allows you to custom-tailor their payments, renewals, and account details.

Returning to the example above, suppose an economic downturn disproportionately impacts Europe. To keep your services affordable and avoid losing clients, you can create customized discounts that appear for all European customers.

You can also give customers the ability to self-manage their subscriptions, see their payment history and invoices, and adjust their billing info—all in one, central portal.

Optimize Your SuiteBilling Experience with GSI

Putting all these tools to work can take a lot of time and energy, but with GSI's NetSuite services, you can simply say what you want to happen and watch it come to fruition. Further, you can work with the GSI team to customize your SuiteBilling settings to account for changes in strategy or goals. 

To get started, connect with GSI for a consultation today.