The Billtrust suite of AR solutions helps make sense of customers' ever-expanding invoicing preferences, their growing use of digital payments, and AR teams' valuable time. Accelerating the order-to-cash cycle benefits both sides of the B2B transaction.
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Zuora
Score 6.2 out of 10
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Zuora is one of the best-known subscription billing platforms. Zuora is an enterprise-level product and, as such, provides comprehensive metrics, tax automation, and support for multiple currencies. It also offers Salesforce and NetSuite integration out-of the-box. It often replaces cumbersome ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems that does not focus exclusively on billing.
For a simple invoice-based organization, especially with multiple stores, Billtrust is an appropriate fit. While lacking in design and intuitive functionality, Billtrust got the job done as far as receiving payments from customers. However, if you are in a subscription-based business or one that invoices on a frequent repetitive manner, Billtrust may not be the best solution.
Zuroa is very well-suited for B2B businesses that primarily have a subscription stream of revenue. It is less appropriate for B2C and retail, if you are only selling one-time products or services, this tool would be overkill and confusing instead of helpful. However, if you need to recognize revenue from subscriptions over the service period, Zuora is a lifesaver.
Billtrust's customer service always replies within 24 hours, leaving the case open until it is verified to be resolved.
The customer portal our credit managers access is exceptionally well designed, allowing us to see when an invoice was delivered, and even when the end-user opened it. There are built-in reports to answer almost any question.
The implementation of Zuora is very helpful. Their interactive training guides are one of the best I've used. It is very thorough and any salesperson can learn how to use it very quickly.
Their subscription management offers many ways to sell a subscription. These subscriptions can be evergreen (renewing every month) or termed subscriptions. The subscriptions can be amended to add/remove products very easily.
The ability to quickly pass through large amounts of usage data for our clients is allowing us to perform billing in a time-effective manner. Once usage data is loaded, a few clicks and all of the invoices for our client base can be generated. Invoices are clean and detailed which help us maintain a good customer experience even with our somewhat complex billing model. The reporting is extremely helpful in calculating the end of month commissions, recognizing and deferring revenue, and overall bookkeeping.
User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.
We have a longstanding good record of invoice delivery and a high number of customers who are accustomed to the look and feel for logging to make payments
Our business is now, more than ever, focused on our core business rather than homegrown support tools for quoting, contracts, billing, invoicing, payments and the rest of the subscription economy. We evaluated other solutions and found this the best and most viable solution given the strong ties to Salesforce and it's integration. Zuora works, and it works well.
I had 20+ years of accounting experience before taking on the revenue role. I had several things to [learn] but was able to easily master the software in a matter of weeks. Zuora is our preferred billing platform that we currently use - very efficient and much more automated than our other platform/process.
There have only been a few days/instances in the past 2.5 years of using zuora that I, personally have had issues or been notified of issues relating to Zuora.
Zuora does a superb job for all the tasks I use it for. Billing - it is trustworthy and accurate. Customer data- it holds it and keeps past records for even cancelled accounts, and subscription builds - it has the ability to make very difficult subscriptions seem easy.
We deal with our customer's AR personnel to help resolve issues with our open invoices. They can help us but seem to be lacking in the overall understanding of the Billtrust software and why things may work the way they do. We have some accounts that are active that we have been unable to add to our corporate account, and as a result, these bills must be paid via check, and we are not currently receiving statements. It would be great if they had more robust customer service or maybe different criteria for creating accounts.
A support request is emailed to their support team, then an automated response is sent to you in a couple hours saying "Hey, someone will take a look at your support request soon". Then somewhere around 12-18 hours later, an actual support member responds with "Have you checked out our tutorials? Here's one that sounds like it might help you". I don't want a tutorial given to me that I've already read through that only exists because of the terrible user design of Zuora's user interface
I think Zuora did a great job. However, they could have provided more guidance on how to deal with out Payment Gateway and Processor provider, as well as guidance around providing a Mobile Responsive experience for sites using the Zuora HPM.
For a less tech-educated workforce, Billtrust did the job and required minimal developer resources on our end. Also, while Billtrust lacked in several arenas relative to Stripe, it was good for us since we were not a subscription-based business. For the price, Billtrust was a good solution for our invoice-to-pay business.
In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly. NetSuite and SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to Zuora in this regard. Zuora has scripting capabilities thru REST and SOAP (deprecated), but I have found it to be confusing and not particularly useful; much of the documentation and KB seems out-of-date or just plain wrong.
10 day reduction in our DSO resulting in increased cash flow
Savings in printing, ink, folding, stuffing, and postage over in-house production, and additional savings with every customer that changes from paper to electronic delivery methods
Increased payment application by batching payment types by day into one file
Enhanced knowledge base for staff through webinars, Twitterviews, conferences, classes, and contact with customer support allow our staff to utilize our tools fully
