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Zuora is a versatile software that offers several key use cases for businesses across various departments. Users, such as Surf Air and …
Overview
What is Zuora?
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…
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What is Zuora?
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…
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Product Demos
Zuora Advanced Consumption Billing - Micro Demo
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Zuora Demo: Suspend For Non-Pay (Part 2)
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Zuora CPQ Micro Demo
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Zuora + Workato | Custom automations that fit your business
YouTube
Zuora Revenue Micro Demo
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Zuora Demo: Suspend For Non-Pay (Part 1)
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Zuora?
Zuora is software for subscription businesses. The software is designed to provide an end-to-end subscription management solution that includes billing, finance, commerce and insights, helping users establish a subscription business model and establish, nurture, and monetize recurring customer relationships.
Zuora spans across commerce, billing, collections, revenue recognition, and analytics. The vendor says their products aim to help users:
- Go to market with their subscription offerings, then grow and retain their customer base across multiple channels
- Automate billing, collections, and revenue recognition to scale their business and support their go-to-market strategies
- Deeply understand their subscribers and the health of their business at all times
Zuora is headquartered in Foster City, CA with 11 offices around the world. The company services over 800 clients, including HP, Dell, Financial Times, Box, YP.com, Vivint, Hubspot, and Schneider Electric.
Zuora Features
- Supported: Product Catalog
- Supported: Subscriptions & Amendments
- Supported: Zuora for Salesforce
- Supported: Billing & AR Settlement
- Supported: Payment Processing
- Supported: Revenue Recognition
- Supported: GL Integration
Zuora Integrations
Zuora Competitors
- Braintree, a PayPal service
- Maxio
- Vindicia
- Microworks Prism POS
- 2Checkout from Verifone
- Ericsson Enterprise & Cloud Billing (formerly Metanga)
Zuora Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Performance highest, with a score of 9.7.
The most common users of Zuora are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Zuora is a versatile software that offers several key use cases for businesses across various departments. Users, such as Surf Air and Branch, have found value in using Zuora as their primary revenue and subscription management system. It handles the complexity of subscription management, invoicing, and billing seamlessly, allowing finance, technology, customer service, and product strategy teams to automate manual processes and save time. Zuora has also proven valuable for the finance and accounting departments, serving as a centralized billing system that consolidates billing accounts and avoids the need for manual revenue reconciliation. Additionally, the integration of Zuora with Salesforce allows sales operations to manage the product catalog accurately and enables sales representatives to generate accurate quotes. Furthermore, companies implementing Zuora globally have benefitted from its ability to address subscription-related problems, recurring payments, prorations, discounts, invoicing, and reporting. The software has also been praised for its flexibility and support in scaling businesses during seamless transitions from other vendors. Overall, Zuora's features cater to multiple departments within organizations by facilitating financial transactions, managing subscriptions efficiently, providing valuable insights through data analysis tools like Zuora Insights, and aiding in compliance with company guidelines during field inspections.
Flexible Pricing and Customization: Several reviewers have mentioned that Zuora's subscription modeling allows for pricing flexibility and customization to meet specific business needs. Users appreciate the well-thought-out pricing structure and ability to request new pricing and discounting options, indicating that Zuora provides a customizable platform.
Seamless Integration with Salesforce: Many users have praised the integration between Zuora and Salesforce, stating that it streamlines sales processes and improves overall efficiency. With this integration, salespeople can easily build product quotes with flexible rate plans and have visibility into Zuora subscriptions and financials within Salesforce, enhancing their workflow.
Responsive Customer Support: Reviewers consistently mention the helpfulness of Zuora's support team. They appreciate the quick response times and assistance provided whenever needed. This level of support contributes to a positive user experience and demonstrates Zuora's commitment to excellent customer service.
Inaccurate Reporting: Several reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction with the reporting capabilities of Zuora. They feel that running multiple reports and combining them to get the desired level of detail is time-consuming. Some users also mentioned the need for improvement in distinguishing between multiple lines of business.
Difficult User Interface: Many users find the user interface of Zuora confusing and unintuitive. They have encountered issues such as clicking on hyperlinked subscription numbers leading to invoices instead of subscriptions, limited customization options to improve the poor UI, and weak search and reporting capabilities.
Lack of Integration and Flexibility: Reviewers have highlighted several integration and flexibility-related concerns with Zuora. Users mentioned challenges in integrating Zuora quotes with Salesforce, difficulties in customizing without Apex coding knowledge, limitations in offering different payment plans and billing frequencies, and a lack of seamless integration with popular accounting systems like Quickbooks.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(76-100 of 134)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
July 05, 2016
New Zuora user
My company uses Zuora as our billing system. We have it linked with Salesforce and it provisions all new sales we have.
- Invoicing- nice invoice templates and very flexible with the type of information one would like to add to it.
- Reporting- numerous reports can be made with zuora and gives you so many filters to work with.
- I think Zuora is working well for our company.
July 01, 2016
Great billing system!
It is used at our subscription MSP line of business which is a business that bills monthly. It is primarily used by our Order Entry and Accounting teams. It helps us manage a large number of subscription customers who need accurate billing on a timely basis.
- Sends out thousands of monthly bills via email and automates this process with just a click of a button
- Our customer base makes changes to their subscriptions frequently and this is easily done in Zuora for quantity changes, product changes etc via the amendments feature
- We love the 360 sync function from Salesforce to Zuora and will begin utilizing SF as the complete CRM system in the near future to have all of this information in one place
- The concept of not having a credit memo is quite frustrating. Their are times when we do invoice item adjustments that relate to things such as bad debt, foreign exchange differences etc however their is no option to select these accounts. We are limited to only the revenue account which makes us perform a manual process on the back end to get the accounts correct.
- The MRR and CV metrics are not accurate since they don't include discounts which is basically worthless in our Sales Environment. We have to derive this metric from other data sources outside of Zuora.
- The Accounting functionality is extremely lacking. The trial balance isn't accurate which makes this worthless to us as well.
June 30, 2016
Zuora, friendly and easy, almost too easy.
It is used by our Accounting department. It addresses billing as far as creating invoices and sending to customers. Used to maintain accounts and process payments.
- Billing batches well
- Processed Credit Cards well
- Does payment runs and managing accounts well
- Random issues with taxing
- Should have a recall or undo button
June 29, 2016
Zuora for your invoicing needs
Zuora is our billing software. It is used primarily by the finance department but also used in other departments. It addresses our invoicing, and customer data storage needs.
- Zuora does a great job calculating tough subscriptions and auto -generating credits
- Constantly improving with new versions.
- Amendments to detailed subscriptions are not allowed.
- You must delete and rebuild the subscription in order to change certain information.
- Support response time is slower than I would expect sometimes.
June 29, 2016
Zuora solving your billing requirement fast
It is being used by a department that has a subscription based customer base. Zuora handles the catalog, billing and revenue recognition.
- Zuora handles the customer accounts, payment methods and subscription relation really well.
- Their customer support is really awesome. They are very prompt.
- Enhancing their rest APIs. They have limitations which the SOAP APIs don't have.
March 28, 2016
Great system, but room for improvement.
Our company utilizes the Zuora system to invoice our Managed Service client contracts and for the corresponding revenue recognition. The revenue reports it can generate are used during our period closes to assist us with our journal entries and supporting schedules. It is just the Finance team that uses the system.
- The site is very user friendly for the most part. Without much training, I was able to navigate through the system, and find what I needed.
- One major pro is how automated the billing feature of Zuora is. Once everything is set up correctly, then the creation of invoices and submission to the clients takes minimal time and manual effort.
- The amendment feature for subscription setup makes adjustments to an invoice/contract very difficult. My company in particular has very intricate contracts with projects that don't all begin in the same month. In addition we have annual prices increases, so adjusting the rate plans within our subscriptions takes more time and effort than it should. For example, if the start date of a project/rate plan changes, it shouldn't take two amendments to change the date (one to remove and one to re-add correctly). It should just be a more simple edit feature.
- I would also like to see one central location where we can view only our company's clients, and an invoicing schedule of what will be billed each month. We work for a company that has multiple entities using Zuora, and we see all of the other entities' data. I would like to see a simple filter function that would allow us to only see data pertaining to our entity.
- Another missing feature is a central location where we can pull the total invoiced amounts to date for each of our clients by project/rate plan including the corresponding invoice numbers and status of invoice.
- Would also like a way to enter a reference ID for each usage project/rate plan revenue schedule. Each period when we pull the revenue report, we have to go in and manually enter the ID
March 28, 2016
Zuora the beta product
We use Zuora to track our customers' subscriptions and to invoice them. The recurring subscription management is very useful, but other features we'd hoped we could use it for (tracking number of active customers, revenue module) have not been very helpful. It is used by the entire company, our sales staff uses it to track their customers' products, and offer them upgrades/supporting products.
- Proration - when Zuora is supposed to prorate, it does it accurately
- Maintain subscriptions - on stable customer accounts, we can rely on zuora to maintain and bill them.
- Updates to the product catalog are easy and not disruptive to existing customers, only affecting them at the renewal of their subscription
- Updating posted invoices is easy.
- Products are stuck on the calendar month - adding plus months or other irregular subscriptions is clunky and difficult
- Credit Balance adjustments - I'd like to be able to apply negative invoices to positive ones, instead of relying on CBAs that can't be easily traced back to each other
- Even with all subscriptions auto renewing, it is difficult to tell what our renewal invoices for a month will look like - since we have products scheduled to start and scheduled to end.
- Zuora can hold multiple payment methods but it can only have one designated for everything, and switches must be manual. If payment methods could be per subscription or product, that would be nice.
We are using Zuora in our billing department. The quote is created in Salesforce and then sent to zbilling where a bill run is performed and invoices generated.
- Strict control over subscriptions start/end dates
- Control over cancellations; billing is stopped right away
- Autopost and Autoemail feature (although not able to use this feature in production just yet)
- Not able to generate a report for billing in home base currency (we deal with billing in multiple currencies)
- Does not accommodate fractional terms (contracts must have full number of months) therefore it is difficult to make products co-terminus
- A negative invoice can't be directly applied to an existing invoice to offset the charge
March 28, 2016
Subscription billing platform for everyone.
Zuora is our payment and subscription management platform. We migrated to Zuora last year, July(2015). It was a seamless migration.
We offer recurring subscriptions to our customers. Zuora helps us in invoicing, past due management and payment collection.
Here is a list of some of the key Zuora features we use across our organization.
We offer recurring subscriptions to our customers. Zuora helps us in invoicing, past due management and payment collection.
Here is a list of some of the key Zuora features we use across our organization.
- Account management
- Invoicing
- Payment Collection.
- Credit card management.
- Subscription management.
- Revenue recognition.
- Reporting
- Past due management.
- Recurring invoices - Zuora does particularly well in case of recurring invoicing. Invoices are accurate and contain enough information for our customers. On top of that, Zuora gives us flexibility to customize invoices which is a very useful feature. We directly share Zuora-generated invoice pdfs with our customers.
- Subscription Preview - Subscription invoice preview is one of the most important features we use in our ordering flow. We call Zuora preview API to get the actual charges that Zuora will charge instead of calculating that ourself. This way user does not see any difference between the charges shown in the ordering flow and the actual invoices.
- Revenue recognition - Our finance team started using Zuora's revenue recognition instead of Oracle Finance. Now this whole process is straightforward
- Salesforce integration - Our customer care team uses Salesforce to track and fix customer issues. We have seen a lot of improvement in customer issue resolution time after integrating Zuora with Salesforce.
- Payment method per subscription not available - Zuora currently only supports one default payment method per account. Being a subscription platform our customers use different payment methods for different subscriptions. We had to design our own payment run because of this.
- Bill Runs are slower sometime - We have many subscriptions. We run bill runs everyday to create new invoices. We have seen that sometimes it takes more than 12 hours to complete.
- Synching of settings and product catalog between different environments (sandbox and production) is cumbersome.
- Improvement needed for Braintree integration.
March 25, 2016
Zuora - a great billing tool!
Currently, the department that I oversee uses Zuora for billing and payment processing of one line of business, producing and invoicing about 900 invoices a month. We are currently transitioning a second line of business over to Zuora at which time approximately 1,500 additional invoices will be produced and distributed each month.
- Usage files are uploaded and processed in about an hour.
- We have set all of our invoices to be distributed by e-mail and all are sent at the click of a button. Invoices can be easily resent to specific customers through Zuora which eliminates any chance of human error of sending to the wrong e-mail address.
- Electronic payments by credit card or ACH can be set up in Zuora and all processed at once with the click of a button.
- Reporting needs to be enhanced. We currently have to run multiple reports and combine to get the level of detail that we require.
- Distinguishing between multiple lines of business needs to be improved. Zuora should provide an option for multiple cash, accounts receivable, deferred liability accounts (balance sheet accounts) so that we can easily manage and report on this information.
- Aggregate billing; I'm aware that a first release recently came out, though I haven't yet used it to know how well it works or if it meets our needs.
March 25, 2016
Zipzap Zuora
We user Zuora for all subscription based selling products. Zuora solves the following problems: recurring billing, auto renewal and payments.
- Recurring Billing.
- Auto Renew.
- REST APIs.
- Invoicing.
- Managing multi currency under single account.
- Allow multiple accounts in single transaction. For example partner/ end user.
March 25, 2016
SaaS Zuora Review
Zuora is our primary billing system utilized for charging our customers on ARR and NRR products. It allows us to keep their subscriptions up to date in billing terms, run reports for analysis, utilize for collections and invoicing, and several other functions.
- Zuora shows detailed changes to the subscription. The primary strength is you can see how the subscription's history has evolved as well as who made those changes.
- Zuora has the ability to run several reports. Its strength is the ability to run analysis on your customers and their billings.
- Zuora syncs with CRMs such as SalesForce. Its strength is the ability to connect your company's billing and CRM system together.
- Zuora recently took the edit invoice button away, a very useful tool in my opinion. This component should be an option for users.
- Zuora's sync with SalesForce does not work on 100% of accounts. This absolutely needs to work all the time.
- The subscription amendment history needs to look cleaner, rather than just links and numbers. It could be categorized, named, and dated more efficiently.
March 25, 2016
Zuora Flexibility with a learning Curve
Our organization has used Zuora since 2013 across multiple product channels, payment frequencies, and currencies. Our Financial Operations Department uses Zuora exclusively for all credit card and manual invoicing accounts. Zuora is integrated with Salesforce as well as NetSuite. Our self service customers receive automated invoice e-mails upon payment and our sales assisted customers receive invoices originating from Salesforce.
- Zuora has a powerful reporting function allowing a ton of useful information to be extracted.
- It can be tailored to fit your particular business needs.
- It produces an attractive invoice that is simple and can incorporate purchase order numbers, VAT, etc.
- For invoices that are already posted, it only adjusts the Grand Total rather than individual line items. Customers are occasionally confused by this assuming the adjusted invoice is incorrect.
- Zuora has several shortcomings when it comes to coupon calculations especially when an invoice is adjusted.
- On invoice adjustment items, the drop down menus change order reducing workflow efficiency.
March 24, 2016
Profit oriented, Impactful results.
Zuora is being used in the accounts receivable department for payment processing and generating daily reports.
- It is a helpful tool for processing payments and refunds in some cases.
- It helps us to pull all sort of data related to aging.
- It is helpful for marketing as well.
- In my opinion it should have more detailed tabs.
- Analytics.
- Financial reporting.
March 23, 2016
Zuora Complete Business Solutions
Zuora is being used by the finance department for products like Audicy and AAPC Coder for renewal and periodic payments received. The AAPC website is linked to online payment by credit cards through Zuora.
- Zuora has capability for analysis of financial data and provides managerial reports for decision making.
- Zuora has automated renewal of payments automatically.
- Once card details and payment frequency [are[ updated the AR part is made easy.
- Report for Aging giving date wise
I use Zuora as the sales central and all sales are processed in zuora through our processors (Chase, PayU etc.). It addresses charging our clients but if it had a more user friendly interface it would be much more desirable of a product. I have never used Monexa billing but strongly doubt that it has zuora's competencies. I would not consider switching.
- Zurora gives great feedback from processor issues (e.g. "credit floor" etc.).
- zuora is comprehensive and it organizes data well
- zuora is always up, hardly ever down time
- Sometimes the system is too slow.
- It's incredibly complex to process more than 1 card for a single sale.
- Zuora's interface isn't particularly friendly.
March 21, 2016
Why we like Zuora
We currently use Zuora to bill and track usage for some of our volume sales products. This allows us to manage billing, credit memos and revenue much better than the method we used before implementing Zuora.
- Complete feature set with clean user interface
- Easy to create reports
- Functional integration with other key systems that we use
- Some of the features are not as intuitive such as the way termed billing is set up in the subscription level. It is very difficult to figure which features should be toggled on or off depending on the particular scenario we are dealing with. The naming conventions do not seem intuitive if you are not a billing expert.
- Since Zuora is very date driven, maybe determine if there are certain date features that could be eliminated...to avoid confusion.
- Make it easier to send customers payment receipts on demand. A toggle switch on the account for "payment received" would be nice.
March 21, 2016
Why Zuora
We are using Zuora in few web applications to manage our subscription related business.
- Easy end to end subscription management
- Good access control for different kinds of users
- Good integration with other systems
- Can be better in user management flows
- Screens can be more user experience friendly
- Searching any data within our Zuora account can be better
My company uses Zuora to manage recurring subscriptions for multiple product lines in an online advertising sales organization.We were able to migrate from another vendor to Zuora in a seamless manner, and the support has been fantastic. We've scaled our business around how flexible Zuora has been for us, and we're introducing new product lines into Zuora when we monetize them.
- Zuora is fantastic at calculating prorations and adjusting invoices and credits automatically.
- Zuora makes creating invoice receipts simple, while looking great and providing tons of details.
- Zuora is flexible and integrates with many other services and products with minimal tweaking.
- Data exports and reporting is powerful but not very intuitive.
- Adding dashboards with visual charts would be fantastic for at-a-glance monitoring.
- Exporting invoices for a full year with each payment as a line item would be fantastic for annual statements for customers.
March 18, 2016
Four years of using Zuora, and a very satisfied customer
Zuora is currently utilized for all billing functions in our organization. This encompasses invoice generation, payment processing, credits, etc. Zuora reporting functionality is also used frequently to provide information to both customers and internal sales representatives when needed. Multiple departments have Zuora access, however Zuora usage remains primarily with the billing team.
- Easy to navigate and very well laid out.
- Contains a multitude of functions, including dispatching automated notices such as past due reminders, expiring credit card notices, etc.
- Payment processing and invoice adjustments are quick and easy.
- Very stable platform. In the rare case that we experience an issue of some kind, the support response is lightning-fast.
- No real built-in function to credit an account for a future (yet-to-be-invoiced) billing period. Alternatives are available, but not ideal.
- Aside from usage-based billing, not geared towards invoicing in arrears (for services rendered).
- Making multiple account adjustments without the aid of an API interface can be cumbersome.
March 18, 2016
Good only in theory
Zuora is used by the revenue and general ledger accounting departments. It theoretically allows for easier subscription management for my company.
- Web interface is designed pretty well, easy to navigate
- Easy to create customized reports
- Integration with other platforms
- setup was a pain
- ur system does not allow for a real AR aging that ties to a credit balance on each account
March 18, 2016
Grow your revenue with ease and speed
We are using Zuora for our enterprise billing and revenue recognition.
- Subscription based billing is handled very well.
- Product catalog is very flexible.
- Discounting features.
- Billing adjustments
- Invoicing templates
Zuora is being used accross the organization for virtually all of our subscription management and billing needs. As a SAAS based company it's primay purpose is to manage the subscription lifecycle of our customers.
- It keeps a record of material changes to subscriptions in versions. These can be reported and and researched as needed.
- It is cloud based which minimizes administrative overheard of the system
- The billing rules are flexible
- Zuora rates subscriptions based on time, not usage. If you sell value to your customers in usage (not time) this could be an issue when customer upgrade mid-term.
- Usage is marked as processed through the date of the last run invoice against that subscription and charge, even if zuora didn't rate a charge (invoice) against it.
- Being cloud based it means that any data modifications of any size have to be done against cloud based API's, orders of magnitude slower than equivalent on prem/sql based solutions.
March 18, 2016
Zuora - OK, but not great
By the back-end systems team to manage customer subscriptions and bill charges.
- Managing subscriptions and charges, as well as monthly usage that we upload.
- API requests sometimes return errors, even though the change was applied, which causes double billing.
- Payments sometimes get stuck in processing and require opening a ticket to address.
- The API does not allow basic things like creating a Payment run, making it out of sync with the user interface.
- The service goes down more often than I'd like.
March 18, 2016
Zuora user review
zuora is used by our finance department for external billing of customers. It provides a more functional invoice system than Netsuite.
- Data exports are very comprehensive in zuora, easy to build reports break information into categories that makes building up a report from scratch extremely easy.
- Makes viewing customer balances and statements of account extremely quick and easy. When taking a call from a client there is no time spent researching information as it is all there available for you instantly.
- Credit card management has become significantly easier. With a variety of options in charge our customer base in different situations, automatically, broken up by currency is easy to report on and much simpler to review.
- Not having credit memo functionality has been a rather large situation for us at times, a good majority of partners want a credit note if they have something returned, and showing them a statement of account with a reduced balance owing is just not the same.
- Transfering payments from one invoice to another is a bit of a hassle, having to do an external refund and a new payments appears to customer as an extra charge and payment that often results in a call that has to be explained.