Zuora is a great, while you do need internal IT resource to support it (able to code!)
December 15, 2016
Zuora is a great, while you do need internal IT resource to support it (able to code!)
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Zuora
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.
Autopay is fully integrated between Zuora and IPP gateway (which we chose), and it is great. We have had a 3% uplift on the auto pay sign up in the first few months after moving to Zuora platform without any paper involved. End of month close is so much easier, no more manual calculation of deferred revenue. Reports still need improvement, [there are] still quite some manual steps involved. Billing operation still needs to be simplified. Billing set up and subscription amendments are time-consuming.
Evaluating Zuora and Competitors
Yes - We were using Freshbooks before. It was easy to use, but does not support different logo from subsidiaries, or revenue recognition for advance payment.
- Product Features
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
The 360 sync to salesforce is great, allowing other users in the business to have access to billing and payment information
We would love to have access to more product reviews and be able to talk to business users with the system, understanding how they like and dislike the system.