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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
(1-13 of 13)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 29, 2021
Zuora - managing subscriptions and headaches
Zuora is used to manage Subscriptions of our SaaS offerings. It is used by our Sales, Accounting, Finance & Accounting, and Collections Department. Zuora helps manage our subscriptions and have a lot of features to make management of these subscriptions easy. It integrates well with our SalesForce platform and allows us to make changes to subscriptions with a user-friendly UI. There is an audit log to show the different versions of a subscription.
- 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.
- Zuora's revenue recognition is no longer in compliance with GAAP ASC606 if you plan on using Zuora to do revenue recognition. They acquired RevPro in which RevPro will be compliant with the new accounting standard. However, RevPro is a separate software and will cost money. To my knowledge, it is not in Zuora's roadmap to configure Zuora's revenue recognition features to be compliant with the new revenue accounting standard.
- Zuora's reporting needs some improvement to help measure churn. Several reports need to be run and manipulated in excel to see which clients canceled their subscriptions, turned their auto-renew off, or removed a product from their subscription. To us, all of that is considered churn and there is no way for Zuora to measure all 3 in a single report.
- There are also many clicks I have to make to accomplish a small task. Of all the software I have used for work, it is easily the one that took the most training. I still don't have it figured out a few months in.
November 03, 2020
Use at your peril
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Zuora is the center of our billing system and subscription management solution.
- Distributed calls our fast
- Finance love its reporting
- Very buggy
- Alerts often only appear after we report the issue to them - no apparent automatic monitoring of systems
- Support is very variable and often just try to get rid of you
- Ridiculously overpriced
- Use customers as testers
- Have secret or hard to find limits
January 10, 2017
Zuora is an excellent service
My department uses Zuora to simplify and assist with our billing and revenue management processes for business that we conduct in Europe. We also have proposals to expand its use into other regions. It allows us to focus our efforts on developing solutions for problems unique to our business and let Zuora handle the common financial processes.
- Allows us to easily integrate with various payment processing services. This is great compared to other parts of our business where this functionality must be developed separately.
- Support is always quick and helpful whenever needed.
- The web interface is well designed and easy to use for both developers and business users.
- The documentation available at the Zuora Knowledge Center is an excellent resource that often answers many questions quickly and easily.
- The SaaS model has its benefits, but also creates some concerns when dealing with business critical operations and the uncertainty of the internet.
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 30, 2016
A Subscription Billing Platform that will grow with your business
We currently use Zuora for a subset of our business, but are in the process of rolling it out for the remainder of our core business. It solves the need for a more flexible subscription billing platform that can accurately calculate prorations and tiered pricing while integrating with our tax service and financial ERP.
- Zuora is highly flexible in what can be done through the rest API. Our business builds a lot of custom apps that integrate with Zuora, giving us the flexibility of setting up subscriptions how we want without needing to worry about the complex calculations that are done behind the scenes.
- Zuora, as a company, is incredibly receptive to feedback and have developed new features specifically for our business because of the value they saw it could bring to other customers.
- Zuora does a great job at keeping our team in the loop on upcoming releases. Many times we're able to beta features to give our feedback and help them create an overall better product which is key in any partnership.
- Zuora's integration with our financial ERP is lacking a lot of flexibility that our business was looking for (taxation and discounts on same line level, customer field syncing, etc.). Over the past few months, though, they've made an effort to gather our feedback and start building a revamped version.
- Having a separate product rate plan charge for discounts makes it difficult to give a cohesive experience to the end user. As a business we think about discounts as being an attribute of the initial product rate plan charge, not an entirely separate line item.
- Searching in Zuora (for specific customers, invoices, etc.) is very slow and often fails while trying to search.
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
Zuora - Not for Everybody
Was used for a small product offering. My main experience with Zuora was as an implementation partner.
- Integration with Salesforce
- API is fairly easy to use
- Please stop doing client driven development. New mystery features seem to crop up all the time that are obviously not for mass use. The release cycle also seems a bit chaotic, new features get added all the time and makes it difficult to stay on top of the platform.
- Please test your releases better. Every new Salesforce release seems to bring a new set of seemingly glaringly obvious bugs.
- The knowledge center can be a lot easier to navigate. I find it easier to google for the topic and have it lead me to the knowledge article I am looking for rather than using your UI.
- There is a real lack of enterprise level support (last time I checked). There really is no easy way to segment the system by profile/division etc. People still need global access to do simple things like creating a bill run.
- There needs to be WAY better documentation on your payment processor integration. There are a number of special flags that need to be set, and data is being grabbed from all over the place making customizations a long and arduous process.
- Why can I only have a single Accounting Code per payment type (especially when I cannot have multiple of the same type - e.g. Credit Cards).
- The product catalog UI can really use a re-haul (plus the naming system is confusing). Any product with 20+ rate plans becomes a huge chore to manage.
- The Multi-Currency editing is awful as well, you can only set one charge at a time instead of making several changes at once and then saving
- More debugging tools on the platform would be extremely helpful. The product itself has so many moving parts it's sometimes impossible to tell WHY something is happening.
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.
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
March 18, 2016
Very trying and complicated
We have been using Zuora for less than a year. We started in July 2015. Our company was a small family company of about 300 employees or so around the globe. We were bought by a large corporation in June. We are a consulting firm in the hospitality business mostly. Although we do other venues as well such as sporting events, retail etc. Our consultants go out into the field and anonymously check to be sure that whomever they are inspecting are following guidelines set forth by the company. For example we will go to hundreds of Marriott hotels each year to check and be sure they are up to par in all aspects (e.g. room, food, personnel, etc.).
- Recurring invoices are easy to produce
- Invoices look ok
- We are not a subscription based business. All invoices have to be created using usage files. What once took us 5 minutes or less now takes 15 minutes or more.
- I have yet to receive an answer to a question from support when there has been a problem. The typical answer is I don't know why that happened.
- Instructions in the knowledge center are not very clear and very hard to follow.
- Templates used for mass entries are extremely confusing.
- Every time an invoice is created we have to wait about five minutes and make sure that we receive an email that says the invoice creation was a success, which really slows down progress when things are busy.
- I can think of very little that makes this system user friendly.
March 16, 2016
Zuora: Best But Imperfect
Our organization uses Zuora across sales and finance in conjunction with Salesforce.com to manage all product subscriptions and invoicing. We use its price book for quoting as well, and its data is pulled to our other websites for renewal and product-add purposes.
- Subscriptions are handled very well. They are flexible and easy to manage.
- Invoicing and bill runs are also flexible and easy to manage.
- The user interface in many places is obtuse and complicated.
- The system has several inexplicable rules dealing with subscription amendments that should be removed or user-toggled.
- The accounting backbone of the system is weak and could be more flexible.
January 04, 2016
See how Zuora Insight helps Jasmine Software help acupuncturists
Zuora Insights helps us at Jasmine Software see which users are actively using our product and the features they're using most. This helps us keep a pulse on the users happily using our product versus the ones who might need a little nudge. With Zuora Insights, we can easily see which trial users are having difficulty with Jasmine and proactively reach out to them and help them along. And, for paying users, we can see our most active users and help the less active ones be more productive by introducing them to more of Jasmine and getting more value out of the product.
- Simple user interface to easily navigate information
- Easily allow third party products to extend and collect data
- I'd like to see Zuora Insights provide some automation such as sending an email template to Jasmine users based on certain user actions or insights.
December 08, 2015
My insights on Z-insights
We're using Zuora Insights to track our client health across the entire organization, looking for leading indicators of client attrition, as well as identifying client success stories.
- Aggregating data from multiple sources
- Provide digestible trend reports
- Segmenting clients by sector or usage trends
- Ease of connecting with third party data sources
- Customized multi-variable reporting
- Exportable reports