You may be used to working with Zuora in a certain way over the last few years and we don’t want anything about that to change! However, we do want to start being a lot more intentional in supporting your desired business outcomes.
Zuora’s Journey to Usership (J2U) model provides a path for growth and maturity in the Subscription Economy. In working with companies across all these stages, we learned that there are 5 focus areas that every company evolves and invests in on their journey:
- Offering Design
- Subscriber Experience
- Financial Model
- Business Operations
- Enterprise Architecture
The five areas represent what you need to know to excel as a recurring revenue business using Zuora’s technology suite. The most successful companies have proven that they are exceptional in all 5 of these areas, and they can successfully take on initiative after initiative as they mature.
This September, the Zuora Community introduced a new series called Answers from Zuora Architects hosted by @Jonathan Brown, Director, Customer Strategy where he brought in Senior Solution Architect @Kevin Coggin and @Randy Wong, Solution Architect Director to share their experiences and introduced their solution design guide on how to streamline billing operations.
If you missed the session, please see the presentation and videos you can watch on-demand.
Common Considerations when Streamlining Your Billing Operations with Zuora
Utilize your product catalog to drive efficiencies through
- Configuration Standardization by reviewing charge configuration attributes, subscription structure, and asking yourself how much you can realistically standardize.
- Automated Pricing by streamlining pricing and adopting the latest features
Properly orchestrate orders so your subscriptions and charges are aligned and prorations and credit are minimized
- Focus on Order orchestration & timing by leveraging trigger conditions, ensuring the correct date is passed, and TEST! TEST! TEST!
- Order Preview. Utilize Order Preview to view the outcome of a new order before committing to Zuora
Optimize your overall processes to maximize your use of Zuora Billing
- Sunrise to Sunset. Globally distributed operations teams can be more responsive when issues arise.
- Pre-invoice data enrichment of account/subscription, draft invoice processing through common in-tax integrations.
- Use Workflow!
Some additional considerations include
- Billing preview through API or Developer Tools and understand Tax Engine integration implications
- Using Performance for faster bill runs, but it should not be used as band-aid for bad billing process
Learn More
View Presentation
Advance In Your Zuora Journey to Usership with Our Solution Design Guides
We’ve worked with thousands of companies on their journeys to success as a recurring revenue business and have seen what the best recurring revenue companies excel at, what pitfalls to avoid, and best practices to follow. From this experience, we developed the Journey to Usership framework which is essentially a tool kit
One part of that toolkit is our library of Solution Design Guides. Each guide (one for each initiative in the J2U framework) is organized by scope/checklists, key considerations, and Zuora design patterns. The goal is to provide a general holistic baseline and approach to a well architected Zuora platform.
Start your journey by becoming a member of the Journey to Usership group where you can review and provide feedback on our solution guides as well as continue to ask questions and share your use cases to our Zuora architects.