Coupa vs Zuora

• Ease of use. No IT support is needed. As the procurement manager, I'm also the Coupa administrator. I have the ability to configure, correct, manipulate, etc., the system to our needs.
• No on-going training. The system, both P2P and Sourcing are incredibly intuitive. Many SAAS modules change dramatically with each new version and require additional training. Coupa does a great job of putting updated, searchable documents on-line to augment any additional training employees may need.
• Rock solid stability. Coupa is never down, they far exceed the SLAs we have in place with them. I've never had a catastrophic failure or outage with them.
• SOX compliancy. Need I say more? My internal and external audit teams have given the tool more than a passing grade.
• Thought leadership. The tool is constantly evolving to live up to the high expectations of its user base. The Coupa Community has skin-in-the-game and Coupa listens to our needs/wants as well as adding their own cutting edge touches to the tool.

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• The CPQ quote engine makes our quoting much simpler and allows us to configure quotes quickly. The added advantage is it allows to turn the quotes in to subscriptions at the click of a button when the business is won.
• One of the great things is the one you least think about. It simply sits in the background and does its job. Each subscription is configured to be invoiced and payments collected on daily schedules. We only know when things aren't right - which is rare.
• Having the subscription information in Salesforce is a godsend. We have used the power of Salesforce workflows, formulas, reporting etc to make this data work for our customer-facing teams.

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• Implementation using a third-party consultant was a mistake. Maybe we had the wrong consultants assigned to us but make sure you understand who is doing the implementation. Implementation is costly but extremely important.
• We often can have small issues with approval chains and they are hard to figure out. If there was more information on how to understand approval chains without reaching out to support, it would help.

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• The user interface is a disaster. There are many things that make no sense, such as clicking on a hyperlinked Subscription number that takes you to an invoice instead of the subscription.
• Extremely limited customization capability to improve poor UI
• Searching/reporting is very weak and difficult to use. The format of exported data is at least different than what many other systems tend to use. I find it unintuitive and difficult to manipulate or perform tasks such as vlookups and filtering; perhaps it's really smart and I just don't get it
• The concept of a credit memo does not exist...yet. They keep promising it but have not delivered. Their solution has been Invoice Adjustments and Invoice Item Adjustments, which at least don't make sense for my business.

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• The easy internal process to find. Given this is the same for all teams, I'd guess there is a positive impact from our Finance Team as they only have one tool they have to manage, pull reporting from, etc.
• Frustrating process, as mentioned at times this can be a frustrating tool to use, which I think causes a lot of employees (who are not on the Finance Team) to direct undue frustration towards the Finance Team, creating avoidable tensions.

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• We've been able to close deals faster with the implementation of Z-Force Quotes and DocuSign within Salesforce. Plus, this puts the tools in the hands of sales to do the work, not support staff. Added bonus of having better information within Salesforce in regards to previous quote history and current subscription numbers.
• Our finance team is better able to act like gatekeepers in some instances when it comes to the kinds of deals that get created because the product catalog and pricing plans are more standardized. A plus in transparency between sales and finance.
• Standardizing your product catalog into a model that works within Zuora can be challenging IF, as a business you've not already formalized your catalog and you do a lot of non-standard things like packaged deals or 'bundling' as some people call it. Having a successful Zuora implementation may mean being flexible in how you sell, but the good news is that making that standardization is good for the entire company, not just sales and finance.
• There is a real sense that you need to find the ROI in Zuora, especially in the early stages but I don't think most people will. When you have to migrate part of your accounting & business to Zuora it shines a very bright light on a lot of flaws you may already have. It takes time to adjust and normalize data in Zuora and in many cases you may not get the kind of accurate business reporting (churn, MRR, ARR) you were hoping for in the first year if your subscription business is based on annual or multi-year deals. If you're monthly, you should have none of these issues.
• Customer service has greatly improved. Our team has better transparency into the subscriptions of our customers and it makes it easier and faster for our CSA staff to zero in on the products and services our customers are using.
• Sales has much better information at their fingertips in Salesforce to help them make better sales.
• Making the migration from wherever you are into Zuora can be very challenging. In our case we had a homegrown solution so the migration was a bit difficult. Post-migration we felt a bit like we got kicked out of the nest with some rising frustration. This has since changed with added account management and increased support.

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