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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
YouTube
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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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
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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 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.
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Reviews
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October 25, 2019
Scalable subscription billing solution for SaaS companies
Zuora is being across our entire organization for everything from annual subscription renewals and one-time purchases to issuing refunds and credits. Since we are a SaaS company, it is the perfect billing solution for us to be able to easily create quotes, invoices, and perform other billing-related functions. The solution for our company is not having to manually run/create billing items or manage multiple platforms for our billing and subscription-related needs.
- Integrations - We have a deep integration with Salesforce that allows you to easily update quotes/contacts/billing information in Salesforce and have it reflect in Zuora.
- Ease of use - Very easy to manage and figure out where to navigate to.
- Automation - There are many features/functions in Zuora in which you can automate, which will save a ton of time performing otherwise manual and repetitive tasks.
- The UI could use an update or refresh and layout seems like it can be condensed.
- Areas that are not currently automated take some time to adjust and figure out. Issuing refunds, credits, amendments to subscriptions from a basic user perspective isn't always super easy in the beginning.
- More reporting capabilities from the view of a CSM / account manger. Sortable dashboard.
May 09, 2018
Great tool for short, simple subscriptions
Zuora is a point solution for subscription billing. That's all it does, but that makes it a critical part of our business, managing our complex deals with customers, generating and delivering invoices and credits to them.
- Consolidated invoicing
- High-volume, complex subscription management
- 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.
December 14, 2017
Does exactly what it says on the tin!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are a SaaS business and use Zuora to manage all our subscriptions. From original quotes in Salesforce, to regular invoicing and payment collections, to feeding back subscription and customer information back to Salesforce to enable our customer success, support and billing departments to have all the information they need to hand. The great thing is once the original subscription is created from the quote input is minimal and it just does its job. Invoices and payment collections just work automatically in the background and we only get involved when there are exceptions to deal with. Its great to know you can rely on it and have your focus on other areas of the business. Recent changes have helped improve the way we use Zuora with multi-currency, CPQ and the Insights reporting being the standout areas. Software is not everything and the team at Zuora are always open and willing to help when change comes around and the annual Subscribed event is a MUST for anyone in the subscription economy. I am always happy to recommend Zuora as its years ahead of any competition.
- 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.
- My only con at this point is the speed of the support in the UK - needs to be quicker.
- In the past reporting has been an issue but with the Insights addition, that challenge has now gone away.
August 10, 2017
Zuora is the best subscription management solution
Zuora is being used by the billing department. It addresses subscription domain related problems: recurring payments, prorations, subscription solution, discounts on subscription, credits, invoicing, and reporting.
- Zuora customer support and professional consulting support is really great. They are focused to solve customers problems.
- Very reliable; they meet SLAs. We had quite a few problems in production and Zuora support was on top of the things during short outage times.
- Subscription domain model is well designed. REST API is quite easy to understand because of that.
- Reporting is very UI intensive. There is no way to export a report to some maintainable format.
- Ability to export/import configurations and product catalog. We maintained multiple zuora environments: DEV, QA, TEST, STAGE, PRODUCTION. Each environment required very UI intensive error-prone manual configuration. It caused us many issues.
- It was quite painful to incorporate legacy tax engine that wasn't supported by zuora out of the box.
July 27, 2017
Zuora in a cloud-based subscription model
We use Zuora in a cloud-based environment to process online-payments. In the B2C field we support credit cards and PayPal, in B2B also wire transfers can be processed. It is primarily used to collect payments, issue refunds, send invoices and cancel or amend subscriptions. We also use it to search for payments when customers or companies report uncertain transactions.
- Very good overview on customer-accounts startpage. All relevant information at first sight.
- Convenient search for payments and customer-accounts.
- Stable server availability.
- We have synchronization issues with our database causing delays in payment and subscription statuses.
- Some processes need to be confirmed too often. I don't want to be asked three times if I want to process a refund. Could save some clicks.
- We have one annoying unresolved bug that allows Zuora to create more than one active subscription. This causes double-payments.
July 18, 2017
Best for enterprise and complex sales processes
[We use Zuora to] Capture credit card, select subscription level, integrate with salesforce, create invoices.
- Integrates well with Salesforce CRM.
- Allows high levels of flexibility for different payment schedules.
- zuora is not "fast" and thus not a good solution for transactional sales processes like ours.
- zuora is hard to understand for its average user, typically an accountant, outsourced cfo, etc.
- zuora customer support is slow to respond when instant reply is typically desired.
- zuora reporting is not on par with other start ups in the space and requires considerable learning and customization, leads to poor understanding of data trends.
July 18, 2017
Tha aura of zuora
Zuora is being used as our core billing system by the whole organization.
- Excellent subscription system
- Data quality
- Payment Options - Cash/Credit Balance
- Integration with Salesforce needs to be improved a little bit. The zuora to SFDC sync has issues all the time.
- Few key objects do not get synced to salesforce, example: Invoice Item Adjustment, Credit Balance Adjustment
- Handling installment payments with single invoice. We had to do custom coding for that.
May 12, 2017
My job is easier with Zuora!
It is used only by the finance department but 'feeds' into salesforce which is used company-wide. [It] deals very effectively with subscription businesses.
- Very good with subscription invoicing - works out all amendments prorated according to but not limited to subscription start dates
- Also great that with mid-contract cancellations - credits are automatically worked out and invoiced correctly
- Once default rules are set up everything just runs automatically in the back ground
- Links well with SalesForce
- Reporting - I find both the old and the new reporting clumsy but actually preferred the old
- Lack of Statements - why can I not pull a statement for an account that shows both the invoices and payments on the account?
- The statement that you can pull individually for the invoices or credit balance on an account, just has way too much info on it to send to the customer - it needs to be simplified
We use Zuora to manage billing and subscription for our products and services for the whole company. It controls the subscription level of each customer which in turn drives how much we bill and what features we make available. We also use Zuora for credit card capture for our self-service subscriptions.
- Credit card capture. Very easy to integrate with our web portal; we've had zero issues with it.
- Notification of issues on the Zuora side. The team is very proactive about any problems they're encountering; I feel like I always know what's going on.
- API access. The Zuora API is relatively easy to use and we have notifications integrated into our product.
- The API can be a little obtuse. Customization of fields sent during a notification would be nice. As it stands, we get a notification that something has changed and then we call back into Zuora to get the specifics. It'd be nice to avoid that second call.
May 09, 2017
Zuora - Great option!
Zuora is utilized by the revenue operations department for volume sales invoicing. Currently, it is implemented for two businesses within volume sales; potentially additional volume businesses will be migrated within this fiscal year. It addresses the need for automatic recurring billing, management of subscriptions and ease of credit card payment processing.
- Modeling works well and meets any varied business model you need for high volume subscription intake.
- Automatic recurring billing; reduces manual touch and enables billing team to focus on exception issues.
- Reporting specifically for billing forecast; utilization of evergreen term with no end date creates a false/inaccurate reporting of monthly or quarterly forecasting.
- Zoura quotes integration with Salesforce - this simply needs enhancements made to be more user-friendly and provide better details to error issues. It's frustrating at user levels to not be able to resolve more easily.
January 20, 2017
Zuora First Impressions
Zuora is used by finance to provide billing and accounting support. When integrated with Salesforce, it allows tracking of campaigns based on invoiced totals. It addresses subscription and usage based customer invoicing needs. Additionally, the new reporting interface, allows for more personalized reports that can be used on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
- Subscription modifications through amendments. Allows for tracking the life of a campaign and changes through each amendment
- Reporting. The new reporting interface allows to build out custom reports that meets the needs of different departments.
- Ease of account/subscription set up. Its fairly easy to create and set up accounts as needed in order to keep up with new business.
- Usage based subscriptions for advertising is particularly difficult to navigate as there is minimal flexibility.
- No statement of account reporting, which would be highly valuable in order to provide detailed list of transactions to customers YTD.
- Credit memos/debit memos would be helpful, as the revision process is extremely time consuming. Especially, when involving salesforce integrations.
January 04, 2017
Zuora Review
Zuora is used primarily as our billing and invoice platform but it is also used as part of our dunning process as well as by our sales team to prepare quotes for customers. Zuora is used by sales and finance and it helps address our deferred revenue recognition issue.
- Great UI
- Responsive customer support
- New and improved reporting engine
- It is somewhat hard and confusing to add subscriptions with unique billing situations (for example, billing will commence next month but revenue needs to start being recognized now)
- The inability to run an aged AR Subledger
- Integrations with other platforms such as Xero
December 15, 2016
Invoicing and Billing
Currently using zuora for customer invoicing and payments, only within the accounting / billing department at this time. Allows for easy collection of monthly payments by credit card and ACH which saves processing time and risk of errors associated with manual processes. We also utilize the reporting functions for collections and aging.
- Good end user interface - easy to navigate and find what you need.
- Reporting updates have been helpful in retrieving and managing data.
- Can only send auto payment receipt to a single email address.
- Currently having issues sending invoices to distribution lists out of Zuora, but sending from another source works. This has been brought up with no resolution.
- Would like better payment history / invoice history reporting. There isn't an easy way to export a list of invoices to Excel.
December 15, 2016
Great billing and payment system
We use Zuora every day mainly for our billing. The system also help us keep track of sales, AR projections, current/cancelled clients, etc. It's very friendly in terms of receivables, saves me a lot of time as it automatically sends emails to my clients with past due unpaid invoices, expired credit cards, or invalid bank account information. It's very accurate and you can customize it as you wish.
- The automatic emails are definitely one of the things I love about Zuora. I don't have to worry about manually sending emails to clients with past due invoices, in fact all I see is their reply with the solution. Saves a ton of time.
- Zuora keeps my clients credit card or banking information safe. Not even the people in my company with access to Zuora can see my clients' payment info.
- One of the things find more useful is the "Bill runs" and "Payment runs." It allows me to automatically send invoices and payment confirmation emails to all my clients in seconds.
- I would like to be able to edit the invoices and subscriptions after posted or saved, sometimes my clients want to change the products after receiving an invoice and because I can't edit it I have to create a new invoice with a different number and It leaves a lot of room for confusion plus it takes more time and work.
- Reporting from Zuora was not very friendly at the beginning but it has improved a lot lately.
- I would love to be able to search payments by reference, when a client tells me they paid something by cheque It's impossible for me to find out if the cheque was applied to a different invoice or client. I put the cheque number as "Reference ID" in the payment but I can't search by reference ID.
December 15, 2016
Hi
We use Zuora here for all of our invoicing. We are able to send our customers statements, as well as process their payments and look into their subscription details. It helps my team and myself relay accurate information to our customers for any need that they may have. It is very helpful.
- Visually, the interface is easy to understand. This makes it easy to get into the system and start working.
- Zuora provides detailed invoices that give a clear breakdown of what is being charged.
- Zuora makes it easy to charge out customer's cards for payment. It helps us get our money!
- Zuora has problems with creating invoices dated in the past. If an invoice has been generated for a date past the initial date, invoicing does get messed up.
- Zuora isn't the easiest system to use, there are many small details and actions that can be done within the system that aren't very clear on how to do them.
- Zuora does take very long to load at times, this can be frustrating when trying to charge a credit card.
December 09, 2016
Zuorushka
Zuora is used by our finance and analytics team. As for the finance department, we use it for billing and reporting mainly. It is used for reports on invoice aging, revenue recognition, bookings, etc. Analytics uses it for pulling different kinds of data: MRR, refunds, cash collection, etc.
- Calculates pro-ration accurately
- New reporting is quite convenient
- It is very inconvenient that account credit balance cannot be automatically applied to the future invoice when it is generated.
- We had situations when we were waiting for a customer to enter a new credit card, but we don't want it to be charged for the whole amount. Even if we close the old card and turn off auto-processing, the new card will be still charged automatically.
- It would be better if PO numbers could be linked to invoices, not subscriptions (e.g. first invoice and renewal invoice usually have different POs).
- It is impossible to enter a billing address in a different language (e.g. Russian).
November 30, 2016
A strong product with only a few limitations for those who provide more than cloud services.
Zuora is used mainly by our finance and accounting departments to manage invoicing and our product catalog. Previously, we used our accounting software, so invoicing and creating quotes was cumbersome. Implementing Zuora cut down the time it would take to process the bill run and has also allowed us to manage our AR aging much more effectively but automating the past-due notification on aging accounts. The system, implemented alongside Salesforce, has also decreased the number of errors in quotes generated by our sales team. Because the quotes are now being generated in Salesforce with ZQuotes, our quotes are now consistent and have very few errors, if any.
- Before implementing Zuora, managing the deferred revenue required us to maintain a spreadsheet and reconcile it monthly against our accounting system. After implementing Zuora, our deferred revenue is now managed by Z-Finance and has greatly decreased the closing process. It has allowed our staff to focus on other areas, rather than spending a couple hours making sure that all deferred revenue has been posted properly.
- Before implementing Zuora, we had to manually create invoices for clients based on the information the sales team generated in an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet was our old way of presenting quotes to clients. However, this would often produce many errors in the calculations, etc. After implementing Zuora, we were able to control the pricing and presentation of quotes in the backend, while the sales team only had to focus on getting the sale. This has allowed us to focus more time on making sure that more opportunities are being won, rather than worrying if the numbers are correct.
- Accepting payments from our customers wasn't too bad when it came to methods other than credit cards. However, anytime a customer would like to make a credit card payment, the process was always time-consuming and required multiple forms. Now with Zuora, I can enter the credit card information pretty quickly and Zuora stores the information safely, allowing the customer to just send us a notification that we can process their payment, rather than having them fill out multiple forms every time.
- I wish there was a more straight-forward way of processing write-offs. I've had to change our method a few times because of how the transactions were affecting our revenues. I've had to create my own way, outside of the knowledge center, that now works for us. However, this took some experience and testing to finally figure out.
- I would like to see Zuora set up the product catalog to allow for physical items that are sold. This way, I don't have to create a "rate plan" for a printer. I realize that Zuora is used mainly for cloud-based and subscription services, however, I feel that there are enough companies that might provide a physical item along with a service/software.
- I wish the invoice and email templates were a little more visual (without the need for only HTML or Text.) Word mailmerge for designing templates is very cumbersome that requires testing for multiple use cases to make sure the generated invoice/PDF will display correctly.
November 16, 2016
Zuora - implementation review
We currently use Zuora for our new subscription product but will phase in our legacy product and renewals. The product and engineering team were heavily involved with implementation. The product and finance teams are the current and future users. We are still new to Zuora but hopefully it will help provide more information on our churned customers and reduce our credit card decline rates.
- Hands-on implementation and guidance, great training videos/knowledgebase
- Easy plug ins for multiple payment gateways, will manage relationships
- Plays well with other companies (integrations)
- GL coding and mapping not robust, can't have multiple bank accounts, or wire fee/cost accounts
- Hard to delete or undo actions (payments, invoices, subscriptions)
- Journal Entry output file is not configurable
November 16, 2016
Zuora Review - Positive Experience
Zuora's solution is being used for ownership of all billing related matters within our company. Zuora removes the complexities of recurring billing and makes the process of billing our customers much more efficient. The solution integrates with our online marketplace, which allows us to easily manage subscriptions and bill our customers with a minimal overhead of work - compared to a manual billing process that we previously used.
Zuora is predominantly used by our finance, sales and product management teams. General tasks across the business include: billing, pro-rations, credits and a wide range of other tasks.
Zuora is predominantly used by our finance, sales and product management teams. General tasks across the business include: billing, pro-rations, credits and a wide range of other tasks.
- Pricing changes are UI driven, easy, and can go into effect immediately without operations or development involvement. As a product manager, I could even update our prices on the website in real time because of the way we integrated.
- Sales people (depending on privileges) can update individual subscriptions to accommodate upgrades, discounts, credit notes, or other modifications without involving anyone else.
- The integration and flexibility of zuora to intuitively adopt our multiple subscription and product platform is integral to a seamless order to cash process.
- Zuora makes invoicing quick and easy. This allows us to combine one-time, recurring and usage charges on a single invoice.
- The majority of features needed are not out of the box, this took some time to configure and implement the solution. The API is not very well documented and this caused our development team some hassle when on-boarding the solution.
- Subscription Management Workflows. Once you have a subscription set up and for example, needed to make two changes, you have to do two separate T&C amendments. You cannot simply hit amend and make both changes at once. So what you thought would be only a couple of clicks on the mouse, turns into several clicks.
- When cancelling a subscription the system generates a pro-rated invoice that has caused confusion with our customers, where they think it's a credit note.
November 16, 2016
Zuora through the eyes of a billing dev
We use Zuora as the primary mechanism for processing credit card payments for all products sold by our company. We currently have a few acquisitions that have existing customers on different payment systems, but we have active plans to transition these customers to Zuora as well. The primary problem Zuora solves for us is the security and protection of sensitive credit card information - by using Zuora, we don't have to worry about this at all, since we never receive this data in the first place.
- Protection and privacy of sensitive financial information.
- Powerful APIs for integrating with existing billing systems.
- The latest hosted payment page is much more dynamic, has greater language support, and looks better than the previous one we were using.
- The web UI is a little dated and cumbersome (although it looks like this is something Zuora is working on currently).
- REST API (also under development, to my understanding).
November 07, 2016
Easy Peasy Payment Processing
We use Zuora as one of our main accounting systems for processing subscription payments throughout our entire company.
- User friendly and straight forward.
- The reporting feature is a life saver when pulling a report to calculate commissions and account statements.
- Flexible payment options for customers to make it easier for us to receive payment.
- One nuance is that when processing payments it defaults to select all invoices on a customers account with no deselect all option. Therefore if a customer has 100+ invoices on their account and only wishes to pay a few, I have to deselect each individually which is very time consuming. Otherwise, I have no complaints and would highly recommend it.
- When cancelling a subscription the system generates a negative (pro-rated) invoice that can be confusing to customers. They feel they have a credit, but really they do not.
November 02, 2016
Zuora is a great solution for us !
We use Zuora as a payment system for our clients that use a cloud-based application. We create an account for them and then we manage the subscriptions and payments for those accounts. All the payments are done using a credit card. Zuora gives us the possibility to manage all this in a centralized and easy way.
- It's really easy to use Zuora and to navigate using the UI to manage accounts, invoices, payments, bill runs, etc.
- Zuora offers us a great flexibility to adapt it to our industry and also an amazing scalability while we increase the size of our business.
- There is a lot of information on the internet. For example documents, demos, forums, etc.
- When working with Bill Runs you lose the previous configuration of Bill Runs if you make a change. You can't figure out all the information related to past Bill Runs.
- You can't "reactivate" a subscription, you have to create a new subscription.
- Bad Support! Most of my support requests I end up figuring out on my own and they just waste a couple days of your time by asking asinine questions.
- You can't refund a partial amount of the payment consistently.
- Even though it deals with multiple currencies, it doesn't have a currency conversion feature.
October 12, 2016
Zuora Review
Zuora has been brought on to be the single source of customer billing (across monthly, annual, credit card and manually invoiced subscribers).
- Flexible product catalog - allows us to experiment with various pricing and packaging models.
- Payment gateway agnostic - allowed us to port from our current system, while creating opportunities for alternative payment methods.
- Multiple currencies - gives us the ability to expand internationally with support for local currencies.
- API callbacks - allowed us to hook into existing transactional programs (CRM, ESP).
- API is currently a bit of a mixed bag - between very low level SOAP calls and very high level REST calls. Ton of room for improvement here, including streamlining refund process / closing out unpaid invoices / other use-cased based scenarios (all require many steps.)
- Learning curve - there's a lot to learn & master, some of which may require changing departmental processes.
- Documentation is bit of a mixed bag - there's lots out there, but sometimes found in Community, sometimes found in Knowledge Center or the self-paced training materials. Would be great to reduce the time needed to arrive at an answer to a problem.
July 08, 2016
All the Nopes
I implemented customizations on the Salesforce platform to address product gaps in the Zuora platform that did not meet the business use cases of the end user.
The Zuora platform itself was used by the company to process payments of our clients, but from what I recall the setup of the system was not done correctly and the integration between Zuora and NetSuite was shaky at best and never worked.
The Zuora platform itself was used by the company to process payments of our clients, but from what I recall the setup of the system was not done correctly and the integration between Zuora and NetSuite was shaky at best and never worked.
- Salesforce integration was decent
- REST and SOAP API was good
- Most of the support staff was responsive when tickets were submitted
- Development of the platform and other products seemed to be driven by customer demands rather than core business use cases. This ended up adding a lot of bloat unneeded complexity to the core platform as well as the Zuora to NetSuite integration
- The Zuora to NetSuite integration is pretty awful and should definitely be rebuilt
- Stick with a consistent UI instead of changing it (5.100 -> 6.0 -> 7.0)
- Better use of standard salesforce rather than janky customizations all over the place. A good example would be the use of Product2 to support forecasting, but custom objects still hang off of that and are being used to support a product catalog.
- Credit Card integration was pretty bad in terms of being able to determine errors from the processor or from Zuora
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.