D&B Finance Analytics is a global credit-to-cash solution that provides Dun & Bradstreet data, analytics, and technology to help improve cash flow, increase operational efficiency, and mitigate risk. This AI-driven solution comprises two platforms – D&B Credit Intelligence and D&B Receivables Intelligence powered by GETPAID – that together help finance teams transform their operations and reduce cost through insight, automation, and enhanced customer experience.
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Zuora
Score 8.0 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.
It's good for our vendor and customer due diligence, but mediocre with alerts. The risk scoring and paydex trade information is always helpful, but not always applicable for term debt lenders. But the monitoring of customers has helped over the years to determine any judgments, suits, or bankruptcies that have come up.
Zuora is great for smaller subscription businesses that have a limited number of simple or basic products. As more products are added to the catalog, the ability to report on specific product performance has become more challenging. Similarly, as our number of customers has grown significantly over the past few years, the extraction of data through export files is more of a challenge to capture all data points.
Finding Companies through Search or Advanced Search. It's got an easy search bar. And then for example, we have companies all over the world that come to us. And so we can just choose the country, for example, and then write the name in there and it'll bring up a lot of different companies that maybe are exactly that name or close to that name. And when we see what we believe to be the actual company, we can click on it and then know whether they are credit worthy.
Great UX on the website - fast and easy to use. The speed with which it operates is really terrific and very important for us because we usually have to make that decision right away.
Using something as objective as a numerical score simplifies decisions about offering credit. We have to make a decision usually on whether to offer credit to an advertiser quickly. So what's wonderful about the process is that we don't have to be searching around on Google or any kind of review site and then try to discern whether they're credit worthy. We simply open up the D&B Finance Analytics tool.
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.
I would like to see contact information, such as Accounting contact names and email addresses. Not sure how hard that would be to provide but it would be extremely helpful.
I'm sure there are more things I might suggest, but we don't use enough of the options offered right now in our package.
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.
D&B Finance Analytics reports have just about everything. You can see a full company profile including legal forms, history records, employee count, years in business, paydex scores, delinquency scores, viability ratings, state of incorporations, naics codes, CEO or business owner names, etc. There is a lot that pulls up in this report
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.
Very easy to access, and the reports are generally intuitive and clearly understandable. Some minor issues with entering data, nothing that would keep me from using this software, though. The databases it draws from are robust, and I can generally find the information I need, or get pointed to that information as a result of studying the report.
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.
I rate the performance very good. The report loads quickly and downloads in a reasonable time frame given the extensive complexity of the report. I've never had an issue
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.
Isaac has been very helpful in providing support. I have only inquired once regarding our remaining reports' availability, and he was very helpful in finding the appropriate solution, which in this case was to add additional reports to the duration of our contract at a prorated rate.
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
The online training was worth it. We did an online training with our team and an account rep from D&B. They walked us through the entire interface and answered all of our questions.
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.
I have only used D&B Finance Analytics in my career; however, there are alternatives that we use when the data is not available. We typically request trade references and a bank reference, which are usually very valuable in addition to the D&B report. When all three options provide valuable data, we generally make the best decisions on credit.
Zuora provides way more functionality than Recurly or SaaSOptics as a billing engine. However, it is not a general ledger system like NetSuite ERP, it is still designed to be primarily a billing function that feeds into a general ledger via automated general entries. It has simplified our invoice management and automated billing while connecting with Salesforce for high-powered reporting and cross-departmental collaboration. The automation of revenue recognition has the potential to significantly reduce the time spent on accounting close by a few days.
