Zuora - managing subscriptions and headaches
Updated April 29, 2021

Zuora - managing subscriptions and headaches

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zuora

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.
Other software may just set up payment schedules, but do not really give the options to upsell or change subscription plans like Zuora. The system also does need automatically matched payments to the invoice like Zuora. This freed up human capital for us to work on other tasks.
If your company processes a large volume of transactions, Zuora is well-suited for you. In addition, if you need to make changes to subscriptions to your customers frequently or track usage in order to bill clients, Zuora has the capability to do so. If your company goes through any kind of audits, Zuora's audit log may come in handy. Zuora does cost quite a bit so if your company doesn't process a large volume of transactions or make many changes to subscriptions, it may not be worth the investment.