"From anywhere between three and fourteen days to processing within one day for 13K+ invoices."
Challenges: usage-based pricing models, different pricing models across different countries, reducing manual labor in the billing process, and decreasing invoice mistakes.
Solutions: Billing platform, BI.
Use case: automation of the billing process that supports usage-based pricing models across different countries.
Twinfield provides accounting software solutions in a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. Twinfield’s online accounting software efficiently manages all accounting functions, from invoicing to management accounting – from the smallest startup to the largest international group.
Twinfield aims to expand its business by offering more accounting-related solutions to the market. From an operational and financial perspective, this multi-product approach must
Twinfield has a complex invoicing process, sending out approximately 13.500 fluctuating invoices each month. These invoices are a combination of a fixed monthly fee and a variable usage-based component. On top of that, Twinfield operates internationally and offers equal solutions for different countries, but the pricing models of these countries vary. Additionally, it’s important that customers can change their usage at any time and always receive a flawless invoice, without human intervention. Therefore, Twinfield’s billing run is an intensive process, that took anywhere between three and fourteen days each month, and pricing changes were manual exercises that took several weeks.
The solution Twinfield was looking for to overcome these challenges, should enable them to automate their billing process. This, is in order to reduce manual labor and smooth out invoice mistakes. Furthermore, the billing solution should support the combination of subscription-based and usage-based pricing models.
Twinfield chose CloudBilling’s billing platform for the automation of its complex invoicing process. All of Twinfield’s customers are now invoiced with CloudBilling. Across several countries, with high speed and accuracy, month after month.
CloudBilling’s Billing solution allows Twinfield to aggregate a combination of customer invoicing data from fixed fee/subscription and variable usage data in one place. Implementing CloudBilling, therefore, helped Twinfield to increase efficiency and drastically reduce time and money spent on the monthly billing cycle. In addition to the billing platform, Twinfield uses CloudBilling Business Intelligence to gain real insights into revenue and revenue drivers across customer segments and countries, based on actual billing and invoicing data generated by the CloudBilling billing engine.
CloudBilling easily integrates with Twinfield’s other software applications; functioning as a hub in which information received from Twinfield’s ERP system is transformed into ready-made invoices. Billing delivers these invoices and accompanying information to customers, general ledger systems, credit management systems, and the overarching BI system. This whole process is largely automated and requires only a minimal amount of manual intervention.
CloudBilling’s solutions are very user-friendly; without too much knowledge and experience, Twinfield employees easily find their way around the platform. Moreover, Twinfield appreciates the flexibility of the solutions, as the billing platform effortlessly supports all encountered pricing models and use cases. With that, CloudBilling ensures stability and peace-of-mind.
Another aspect Twinfield admires is the personal touch in service and support. When potential issues arise, CloudBilling pro-actively communicates about these issues and works hard to ensure everything is processed as smoothly as possible. Consequently, this provokes a sense of ‘feeling like being more than just a number to CloudBilling’.
An example of this is when one of Twinfield’s Finance employees unexpectedly left. This posed an immediate problem for Twinfield as no one was available to process the monthly billing run and financial reporting. CloudBilling helped Twinfield out by dispatching one of their support specialists for a couple of weeks. The specialist ensured handling of monthly billing, with as little disruption as possible until a permanent replacement was found. This extensive form of support was of great value to Twinfield, as problems with cashflow and consolidated reporting were avoided altogether.
By automating billing, CloudBilling enables Twinfield to run monthly billing in just one day by 1 FTE. Before using CloudBilling, Twinfield’s billing run took several days and sometimes even weeks by multiple FTE. The implementation of CloudBilling resulted in a dramatic decrease of time and money spent, to successfully run billing every month.
The fault margin of CloudBilling is proven to be minimal. After the implementation of CloudBilling, the credit note to invoice ratio of Twinfield dropped to 0.3%. Whenever a credit note is sent, it is usually because something went wrong at the customer side, or because Twinfield wants to make a concession towards a customer.
Twinfield’s customer satisfaction significantly increased after the implementation of CloudBilling. This is the result of consequently sending out correct invoices and the ability to proactively address faulty invoices.
Before CloudBilling, Twinfield had employees interrupting their holidays and flying back to the office to process the monthly billing run. With CloudBilling, this is no longer necessary. In fact, when COVID hit, the Finance staff was able to switch to working remotely within one afternoon, without problems.
About CloudBilling
Cloudbilling is a fast-growing Dutch tech company that helps companies with complex billing and business intelligence issues. Back in 2009, CloudBilling was pioneered by supporting the first SaaS companies in implementing innovative billing solutions. Since then, CloudBilling's services have expanded to other industries such as Managed Service Providers and Enterprises.
CloudBilling provides solutions for complex, high-volume billing and in-depth data analysis based on billing data to identify commercial opportunities such as upsell opportunities, revenue growth, and churn reduction.