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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
(1-25 of 76)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.
February 23, 2021
Invest in Zuora
[Zuora] is being used by the finance, sales, and success teams. It addresses the problem of not being able to have visibility into billing internally or externally. It also saved us from the issue of having no real "order" object in our system to track changes to subscriptions. The RevOps team has also been heavily involved.
- Subscription Management
- Revenue Recognition
- Invoicing
- Multi-year deals
- Very custom payment plans
- Hosted payment pages
January 18, 2021
Zuora Review
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Redgate currently use Zuora to manage their customer subscriptions, and create quotations for making amendments/adding new products. The whole sales team have adopted this solution since we migrated away from an in-house designed solution.
- Handles simples subscriptions
- It isn't flexible at all, at the sign of something complex or slightly abnormal it becomes a nightmare. Such a restrictive piece of Software.
- Using Zuora has tripled the amount of time our Sales team spend on creating quotes
- Zuora is damaging the relationship between our customers with it's inflexibility
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 18, 2019
Sage Intacct
Zuroa is being used by one department in our business to support a small e-commerce side of our business. We use it also for customers who want to auto-renew.
- Fast
- Open API
- Plenty of plugins/integrations
- Not easy to use.
- Cannot consume products from CRM or ERP.
- Integration with Salesforce is not seamless.
July 03, 2018
Great Subscription Management Software
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Zuora is used as our complete end to end billing, payment, and sub-ledger and is currently in one of our regions with the view to expand this product to all regions around the world in a staged rollout. Zuora allows us to focus on building products and solutions for our customers and team by providing a product that is flexible and scalable to meet our needs. Zuora's ability to quickly build products for our customers and release into production allows us to stay relevant in today's business world.
- Flexibility with the product catalog. Once you understand the product catalog and its capabilities, the possibilities are endless. You are able to spin up new products quickly and test new ideas with minimal development time.
- API focus. Zuora API focus allows us to step away from the Zuora UI and build our own platform over the top of Zuora reducing ambiguity for our customers and team
- Constant upgrades - Zuora is continually adding to its product and listening to its customers to build a product that is leading the way in the subscription economy
- User Interface - Zuora's UI is still a weak point, however, this is negated through the use of its API's. Zuora has done a lot of work in releasing new products to limit its UI experience and the addition of Orders allows for more functionality to reduce the UI issue.
- Complex system - This is both a pro and a con, but in this instance, it is a con because we may not have taken the time to truly understand the implications of all the options that were available. the Flexibility is great however if you do not take the time to understand the product and what problem you are trying to solve, you can make life difficult for yourself later down the track. Take the time to map out your approach end to end and ensure your assumptions at the start are robust.
- Reporting - reporting is weak as such we have moved away to our own reporting data warehouse.
February 06, 2018
Zuora gets the job done, but you'll pay for it
We use Zuora for managing our SaaS-based subscriptions and billing. All departments that interact with the customer have some interaction with Zuora, including Sales, Finance, Accounting, Customer Success, and Information Systems.
- Zuora is great for providing structure to subscription management.
- Zuora is integrated with Salesforce.com, which we use as our CRM.
- Zuora is great at tracking changes made to a subscription.
- The user interface is behind the times.
- Making change to a subscription is very painful.
- Finding the information you need can be difficult.
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.
December 14, 2017
Zuora -- The Best Billing System Out There!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
ClearCare uses Zuora for our entire quote-to-cash process. We use Z-Quotes for our SalesForce quoting integration, which allows our sales reps to book their orders in SalesForce, and send the subscription to Zuora for invoicing and collection. We also use Zuora for our month-end reporting. Last year we also implemented usage records feeding directly from our API into Zuora, which allows us to bill much easier.
Zuora is used solely by the Finance department. Zuora addresses the problem of manual processes in the finance department. We've been able to automate nearly everything, which saves us a lot of time to work on other priorities. Thank you Zuora!
Zuora is used solely by the Finance department. Zuora addresses the problem of manual processes in the finance department. We've been able to automate nearly everything, which saves us a lot of time to work on other priorities. Thank you Zuora!
- Quote-to-cash
- Automated billing and payment runs
- Allows information to feed directly from API integration
- Payment gateways, payment method updater, etc.
- Insights are way too expensive. Should not have to spend $250,000/year for dashboard metrics.
- Add-on products are all too expensive.
- The platform itself is too expensive. We nearly did not renew last year solely due to the cost.
August 20, 2017
All in your hands!
We use Zuora to manage customer accounts so we can have in one place all the information about account details, billing, invoicing, refunds, payments, cancellations, and discounts. It makes easy for customer support to investigate an account. You can search for customer account information, process cancellations, refunds and make any kind of adjustments.
- You can manage subscriptions, for instance, really easily and keep your customer updated on any change thanks to the automatic notifications system.
- Any change done on accounts is updated in real time.
- It gives a lot of possible inputs to use in order to look for the required information.
- Probably a nicer graphic layout.
August 14, 2017
Zuora great for global finance team
We have now implemented ZUORA across the globe for our mulit national company.
Good to see the new multi entity option now introduced.
Good to see the new multi entity option now introduced.
- ZUORA is brilliant at batch invoicing allowing you to perform an invoice to run for many customers at the one time.
- ZUORA does not handle corrections/CNs so well and this is often a manual task that could improve.
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.
We are using Zuora for our monthly invoicing as well as revenue reporting. We leverage the Zuora for Salesforce functionality so that our sales people build Zuora quotes within Salesforce which sync to Zuora automatically once a customer becomes billable.
Zuora allows us to automate our billing process as well as provides flexibility to adjust our products and prices, which was much more limited using out of the box Salesforce opportunity products previously.
Zuora allows us to automate our billing process as well as provides flexibility to adjust our products and prices, which was much more limited using out of the box Salesforce opportunity products previously.
- The sync with Salesforce. The ability for Zuora and Salesforce to sync eliminates manual transfer of data and areas of human error.
- Flexibility of setup. With all the various types of products and different revenue recognition rules, Zuora allows us to set up the rules we need to fit our business model.
- Ease of use. Creating and posting bill runs is simple and straight forward. With a few clicks of a button you are able to create and post invoices for all customers.
- The service team. I have had a great experience working alongside the Zuora consultant team. They have been easy to work with and have the ability to suggest effective solutions to ensure Zuora meets our business requirements.
- The new reporting module is definitely a step in the right direction, but the reporting module could still be better. Mirroring the drag and drop functionality of Salesforce would be great with the ability to create custom dashboards from the data. The 'run detail' vs 'run summary' reporting is a bit confusing. The 'Hide details' functionality in Salesforce would be better. Also, the fact that you can not provide a link directly to a Zuora report is pretty frustrating.
- Ability to bulk import quotes from the SF side that integrates with Zuora. During our Zuora setup we were very surprised that the ability to bulk create Zuora quotes that sync to Zuora was not possible. This caused a real headache for our setup and it would be great if Zuora allowed for this.
January 20, 2017
Decent platform - very rough implemetation
Zuora is being used by a few members of our company. We use it as our system for processing orders, and, eventually, as our system of record for our sales. It will be used to help us with revenue recognition.
- I think the site layout is easy to navigate. It's pretty straightforward/intuitive to know where to go to find things.
- I've gotten the feedback from our engineers that they can be very slow to respond to our support tickets.
- While the layout is ok, performing operations in the system can be very complex and time consuming. The support pages are also not very straight forward. If I need to make changes to one of our subscriptions - I have to make those changes one by one with individual amendments. I can't address everything at once. So for example if i need to edit the duration, price, and level of a subscription - I'm going to need to make three different amendments to do so rather than being able to address all in one fell swoop
- The required password changes are way too frequent. I make my password complicated enough - no need for me to change it every few weeks.
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 18, 2017
Zuora great for SMBs but may be lacking for large enterprises
It is used for our billing and order management teams in sync with NetSuite and Salesforce. One of the problems it has addressed for us is that it has the ability to support complex pricing plans, and multiple pricing plans easily over the course of a customer's subscription. Our billing teams have the ability to update individual subscriptions to assist with service upgrades, trial extensions, or other changes without involving anyone else in different parts of the organization.
- Pricing changes are driven by the UI, which is relatively easy, and can go into effect quickly without operations or development getting involved. We even have the ability to update our prices in real time because of the way we integrated with Salesforce.
- For what we do, Salesforce and Zuora has been an integral integration for our business. Creating reports in SFDC that tie into Zuora is painless, but there are some small limitations to this integration most likely due to the API. Creating dashboards can be a pain in Salesforce due to the limitations of the integration with Zuora.
- The revenue calculations are automated and require no manual touch (which is nice when dealing with a large volume of orders). It is also beneficial that the subscriptions tie in with all of the booking information in SFDC allowing us to perform a quick validation before activating a subscription. The turnaround time to invoice after activating subscriptions is almost immediate.
- The reporting is a bit difficult to work with for those of us who don't use Zuora as a primary means of reporting. There are a large number of fields that you can pull into a report but it is pretty much overkill and some fields are unnecessary to be included with certain reports. The billing can be frustrating when the system does not align with the rev rec schedule so requires manual touch at the end of the month.
- Selling through channel partners can be somewhat of a pain. We've made it work, but now that we are expanding our channel sales we're running into a slew of problems with certain hierarchy's and invoicing.
- Experience some technical difficulties with Z-Quote integration in Salesforce that requires me to manually set up an account or subscription which wastes valuable time when dealing with a large quantity of orders in a given day.
December 29, 2016
Zuora is Great!
Zuora is being used by the Finance department. We use it exclusively to invoice and charge customers through the platform. One business problem that it addresses is how to work with subscriptions.
- Proration: If a customer switches from one subscription to another while the first has not ended, then Zuora provides a prorated amount for the new subscription.
- Customization: We have the ability to send out automated emails, change the default payment gateway, etc.
- Organized: It clearly shows a defined hierarchy that makes it accessible to move from one family account to another.
- Duplicate Emails: There are some customers who use multiple accounts through our application but Zuora only allows an original email address to be used when first setting up the account.
- Duplicate Customer Names: Some businesses share the same name, but Zuora does not permit us to have 2 of the same account names at the same time in the system.
- The only problem that we have been receiving more than often, is having our app sync up with Zuora perfectly. If a customer decides to move to another package, it does not call out to Zuora in time, or with the correct package.
December 29, 2016
Zuoring
Zuora is being utilized as a strategic billing software. It is mainly used to track the subscriptions and memberships of our 50K + subscribers. Zuora is user friendly, especially the reporting that makes my job easier.
- Ammendments
- Data Reports
- The ease of deleting an invoice [could be improved].
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
Zuora is a great, while you do need internal IT resource to support it (able to code!)
With the business expansion, we need to address the below issues:
1. Consolidate our billing from 3 different billing accounts from Freshbooks to 1 account, which Zuora allows.
2. Avoid reconciled deferred revenue/monthly recoginised revenue manually outside the billing system, which Zuora could help with.
3. Strong needs to show billing and payment information to other users in the business, not only the billing operation team. Zuora could sync back the billing information to Salesforce, and allow support team and sales team members to have access.
1. Consolidate our billing from 3 different billing accounts from Freshbooks to 1 account, which Zuora allows.
2. Avoid reconciled deferred revenue/monthly recoginised revenue manually outside the billing system, which Zuora could help with.
3. Strong needs to show billing and payment information to other users in the business, not only the billing operation team. Zuora could sync back the billing information to Salesforce, and allow support team and sales team members to have access.
- The Zuora consultants who I worked with during the implementation stages were extremely helpful. The system was chosen and the initial design was done before I was involved in the whole project of implementation process (with Zuora third party consultant which was not very competent); then we engaged Zuora consultant directly to customise more to suit our business, which turned out to be very helpful and efficient.
- Highly recommended the feature of revenue recognition, saving us the pain to recognised deferred revenue for advance payment manually.
- It is integrated to Salesforce and you could view the billing and payment information in salesforce.
- Reports can be improved. We tried to report on customer number and net Monthly recurring revenue movement from month to month. We could not get all criteria in one report. We have to download the data (a few reports) to our data warehouse and put logics in to work it out. Before the data warehouse automation, we have to do it in Excel manually which is time-consuming.
- Making amendments to subscriptions/accounts is time-consuming, it took a few step to perform one simple function. e.g. 1. currency change on the account requires cancellation of one account in one currency and set up a new account from scratch. 2. Changing the discount on the subscriptions need to remove the product and add the product back.
- The product catalog flat fee one is designed based on $/unit, and not catering well for tiered pricing. e.g. property room between 21 to 50 having the same price for the product, but due to the room number difference, the unit price is different, and having rounding issue when we tried to show monthly fee.
- Product catalog is not flexible enough. We offer monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual payment plan, and it is not a simple multiple your monthly fee by # of month. Billing frequency other than monthly is a different rateplan, and calculation has to be done manually outside before importing back to the system.
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.
We use Zuora to automatically generate invoices and execute transactions for our SaaS product.
- Zuora provides a great integration with SalesForce, so our account managers can see the balance per each customer.
- On top of Zuora and SalesForce we developed a mechanism to allow the sales team to recognize via self-service the Opportunities' amouns vs. invoices.
- Zuora is a perfect fit for subscription businesses.
- We ended up learning that in our business model we sell licenses more than subscriptions. They are two very different beasts. Zuora's advanced subscription features (such as amendments, recurring a priori fees, a posteriori charges) are an overkill for simple business models based on 'selling one-time fee products', such as in the case of licenses. In our case, we ended up not using those features, as we mainly work with a channel that wants to buy licenses and activate them in a separate moment. For this reason, we had to use Zuora as a tool to sell one-time fee things, and then manage the licenses' lifecycle in our production environment.
- Multi-currency pricing is great for companies that go global with one multi-currency pricing. For companies that must have two listing prices with the same currency, e.g. selling with USD priced products both in USA and in Zambia, SKU explosion still happens: you will find the multi-currency even a bit too rigid.
December 05, 2016
Longtime Telecom User
Zuora is used for billing customers and used by all teams through Salesforce.com. It replaced a custom billing platform we had built specifically for our business.
- Connects to Salesforce.com
- Automates manual tasks
- Keeps most users away from the details of billing
- Hosted/SaaS
- Ability to charge late payment/interest fees
- Detailed SaaS based reports (like Cohorts)
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.