On July 19th, the Zuora Community, along with Senior Product Manager in Zuora Revenue, Vivek Ganesan and Nikki Wong, Director of Product Management, hosted its first Table Talk for Revenue customers focused on real-time revenue where we had a conversation covering exporting revenue contracts and the close process dashboard. In addition to the topics mentioned above, Vivek and Nikki answered a number of questions submitted prior to the event. See the Q&A highlights below.
If you missed the Table Talk or just want to review what was covered, you can rewatch the Table Talks on demand now. The close process dashboard is available in Zuora Revenue.
Q&A Highlights
How to streamline the overall close process to shorten the close cycle and have capabilities to identify issues ahead of time?
The close Process Dashboard has been designed to achieve this goal. All the manual work involved in identifying any data or processing exceptions, accounting vs report reconciliation & variances are completely automated and presented to the users in near real-time. For any exception, users also have the ability to solve the exceptions from the dashboard. This will greatly enhance the user experience by saving the effort involved in running & analyzing reports multiple times during the period. Users can focus on core revenue operations.
Can the error management be more user-friendly?
We have launched bulk data management capability on unprocessed / error transactions in Inbound stage tables. Users get visibility to error summary by transaction type in the close dashboard and can navigate to the new Manage Inbound page from the error summary page to solve any errors by way of bulk updates / deletes on error transactions in Inbound Stage. With this capability users get the ability to solve errors by themselves without needing help from support teams, saving considerable time & effort.
Is there a way to export all the details for each of the checks and it's doing?
Export & search capability have been provided separately for each section of the close dashboard. The details link in the data validation tab will give the users the ability to export transaction details related to the specific data validation line item. E.g. From the Details link of ‘Revenue Holds’ line item, users will be able to export the transaction lines on hold.
Is any of this customizable can we add fields to these reports that are being exported or can we add additional validation so that they can be added to this dashboard?
At present, the Close Dashboard is not customizable or configurable by users. We perform eleven exception checks as part of data validations. We will be happy to discuss & add if you have any suggestions on additional validation checks or reconciliations checks as part of the Dashboard. Please reach out to your CSMs.
Does this reconcile only between Zuora Billing and Zuora revenue? Or can it also reconcile between a different billing system and Zuora Revenue?
Currently, the completeness check for bookings and billings for the period is automated and presented in the dashboard only for Zuora Billing to Zuora Revenue, as we do not have direct access to other upstream systems. We will consider your feedback as part of our future roadmap plan.
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About Community Table Talks
Table Talks are collaborative Zuora Community events where customers have the opportunity to connect with Zuora experts along with other users. Each month, the community hosts a new Table Talk on different topics from APIs to Zuora Revenue. View the Community Calendar to see what’s coming up and Subscribe to the Community News to receive announcements for new sessions.