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Great tool for short, simple subscriptions
May 09, 2018

Great tool for short, simple subscriptions

Joshua Henke | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zuora

Zuora is a point solution for subscription billing. That's all it does, but that makes it a critical part of our business, managing our complex deals with customers, generating and delivering invoices and credits to them.
  • Consolidated invoicing
  • High-volume, complex subscription management
  • The user interface is a disaster. There are many things that make no sense, such as clicking on a hyperlinked Subscription number that takes you to an invoice instead of the subscription.
  • Extremely limited customization capability to improve poor UI
  • Searching/reporting is very weak and difficult to use. The format of exported data is at least different than what many other systems tend to use. I find it unintuitive and difficult to manipulate or perform tasks such as vlookups and filtering; perhaps it's really smart and I just don't get it
  • The concept of a credit memo does not exist...yet. They keep promising it but have not delivered. Their solution has been Invoice Adjustments and Invoice Item Adjustments, which at least don't make sense for my business.
In its focused area of subscription management, Zuora does well against competitors. There are some aspects of the tool that appear to attempt to be more "platform" oriented, but fall off quickly. NetSuite and SFDC are not reporting tools, but they look great when compared to Zuora in this regard. Zuora has scripting capabilities thru REST and SOAP (deprecated), but I have found it to be confusing and not particularly useful; much of the documentation and KB seems out-of-date or just plain wrong.
Zuora is a subscription tool. It is very focused and should probably stay that way. I think there is a good reason many businesses are choosing Zuora, but I think they'll be in for a disappointment in many areas, those I've listed in the Cons section of this review. If they make some drastic improvements to the UI, my users will be much more pleased, like removing a little rock out of your shoe.

For a simple subscription business, Zuora is a great tool. If you get into multi-year subscriptions (known to be multi-year from inception), there are challenges, particularly related to revenue recognition, amendments, and, especially, future-dated amendments.