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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
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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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(26-50 of 134)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- 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!
- 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.
February 28, 2017
Zuora Review
- Zuora is excellent for subscription based services. The AutoPay module works great!
- Syncs well with Salesforce.
- The ability to speak with someone would be great!
- There should be an area for notes.
- I'd love to be able to give myself a task right in the system instead of using my calendar.
January 20, 2017
Decent platform - very rough implemetation
- 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
- 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
- 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.
January 13, 2017
Review from a sales rep perspective
- Good user interface
- Simple to use
- Detailed Reporting
- To be honest for my role it serves exactly what I need it to be.
January 10, 2017
Zuora is an excellent service
- 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.
January 04, 2017
Zuora Review
- 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 30, 2016
Flexible, Effective Billing Platform
- Zuora handles high volume, routine transactions very well.
- Zuora offers a great deal of flexibility on how a company bills its products.
- Zuora offers a nice reporting package for finance users.
- Zuora could use some improvements around billing for non-routine/one-off transactions.
December 29, 2016
Zuora is Great!
- 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
Zuora review from the view of a mature startup
- Simple platform for billing - easy to setup and use. We found that our staff pick it up quickly.
- Reporting function is easy to use and a lot of canned reports were pre loaded which makes it quick to generate reports.
- Does not have the functionality for exchange rates. We are a global company and have to manually translate our data to the functional currency as Zuora does not support this feature.
- Zuora has limited capabilities in setting up different billing models - such as tiered discounting. This makes it harder for the business to create custom deals as Zuora does not allow us to bill in a custom way.
December 29, 2016
Zuoring
- Ammendments
- Data Reports
- The ease of deleting an invoice [could be improved].
December 21, 2016
Subscription friendly Zuora
- Fantastic reports
- Organized way to manage subscriptions
- It's confusing when there are two items to one same order
- It's not that user-friendly as smaller platforms [are]. Maybe provide training or videos on how-to would help?
December 16, 2016
Zuora Review
- The billing process in Zuora is very straightforward and easy to navigate.
- Zuora makes it easy to tell what invoices were paid and are unpaid.
- I love how Zuora has big and bold, as soon as you go to a person's account, how much is owed or if nothing is owed.
- The process to add and remove subscriptions from an account is very long and drawn out.
- It should let you send invoices to emails other than what is listed on the account.
- It should keep detailed notes of who did what in every account.
December 16, 2016
Zuora
- They are very user friendly.
- The reporting system was easy to use.
- All the data was accurate that was pulled.
- If you didn't know the name of columns it was harder to find.
- Had to go to several links to get to there I wanted.
December 15, 2016
Invoicing and Billing
- 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!)
- 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
- 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
- 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 14, 2016
Zuora... Difficult to say, difficult to use.
- Manages subscription services specifically.
- Can be altered to fit your particular business needs.
- Their User Interface and User Experience is absolutely garbage.
- They could benefit from more extensive user research and feedback. I feel like they've never had any communication with their users about the ease of using their products.
- Make simpler ways to complete tasks. This could be done if they hired a UI/UX Designer. I am convinced they've never thought of hiring one.
- 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 12, 2016
Enterprise Subscription Billing!
- Subscription Management - Tracking subscription versions, amendments
- Subscription Billing - Providing pro-rated billing, detailed or rolled up billing depending on requirements
- Subscription Product Mapping - Several options for tiered and volume pricing as well as usage modelling within the system that align to most use cases.
- Quoting - Quoting in Salesforce is challenging and not that flexible. This often requires custom work and validation to implement business rules.
December 12, 2016
Best all-in-one provider
- Zuora helps categorize our data effectively
- Provides timely updates when requested
- Very slow in access and result find
December 09, 2016
Zuorushka
- 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).