Zuora great for SMBs but may be lacking for large enterprises
January 18, 2017
Zuora great for SMBs but may be lacking for large enterprises
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Zuora
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.
Zuora provides a good buffer between Salesforce and NetSuite. It is primarily used by our billing team, so our accounting team can use it with NetSuite to leverage their reports. However, revenue recognition is still a manual process since the integration between Zuora and NetSuite isn't perfect. I still prefer to use Zuora for our invoicing and billing instead of using NetSuite for everything billing-related.