Billing Analytics for SaaS: Improve ARR Visibility and Revenue Insights | Nue

Billing Demystified: “Billing Doesn’t Do Revenue Lifecycle Intelligence"

When you buy a car, you immediately understand why monitoring vehicle performance is important.

You need to know your mileage, your gas and oil levels, your speed, tire pressure, and engine temperature to safely go anywhere quickly (which is the entire point of the car). If your dashboard stopped giving you any information, you’d have to go slowly, since your gas might be empty, your tires might be low on air, or you might overestimate how fast you are going.

The utility of your company’s billing engine is similarly dependent on data — yet going without granular ARR as to how the sales side of the house is translating to the bill (think upsells, discounts, cross-sells) is often accepted as a way of life. Without detailed pricing and billing data, you are missing a considerable portion of the big picture as to how to navigate the team towards more revenue.

Let’s consider what can happen when you are able to obtain real-time revenue lifecycle data from billing, and how you can leverage it to make better-informed choices across teams and sales motions.

Legacy Systems Aren’t Equipped to Provide Detailed ARR Data on Pricing Models

Go-to-market teams aren’t failing to extract the right analytics from their systems. Rather, the system isn’t producing them in the first place. There’s two big reasons for this:

• You generally don’t see the necessary level of continuity between the sales team’s CPQ and the finance team’s billing system, nor the level of specificity in the CPQ data needed for meaningful analytics. For example, sales may give a thousand-dollar discount to a new customer, but finance often will not have instructions for how to distribute that discount among the various line items in the invoice. And at least historically, getting CPQ and billing to connect successfully has required a lot of manual effort, not to mention the implementation of BI tools.
• Traditional subscription-based billing engines don’t offer granular line item details focused on mid-term changes. Not having clear mid-term change data precludes the ability to gain a full understanding of upsells, cross-sells, downsells, and other expansion data. In turn, this hurts sales (which needs to know what products, promotions, and discounts are working the best) and customers (who value transparency and a full understanding of how mid-term changes impact their invoices).

If you’re not getting the analytics and revenue intelligence you need from billing software, you’ll have to get at least some of them elsewhere. This generally requires additional time, money, or both. For example, finance needs to know annual recurring revenue (ARR) and/or monthly recurring revenue (MRR) for each customer. Doing it manually in spreadsheets is a notorious time-sink. More mature companies often transition to an automated data pipeline, which saves time but exponentially increases the cost.

The Insights Made Possible by Detailed Billing Analytics

Real-time revenue intelligence data has immediate and long-term benefits for multiple teams. It’s like glancing at your car dashboard while driving — you can match your speed against the speed limit right away, and learn how to improve gas efficiency over time.

Specific teams that benefit from these analytics and revenue insights include:

• Marketing teams, which can review cross-sell statistics to see whether current messaging is successful at emphasizing the synergy between products.
• Product teams, who can analyze product performance per customer segment to prioritize upcoming features and improvements.
• Sales teams, which can evaluate the state of their land-and-expand strategy by reviewing the relative ratio of new business vs. expansion. From here, they can determine whether new customers or mid-term upsells are a greater priority.
• Post-sales teams can review churn statistics to determine pervasive issues that cause customers to leave, and find signs of falling engagement so they can intervene quickly.
• Finance teams can identify unreliable or unoptimized processes (such as inconsistent discounting between sales reps), and whether margins are aligning with stakeholder expectations. This greatly facilitates the push to remove waste and inefficiency across the business. Finance can also uplevel their cash flow management, and gain real-time insights into invoiced vs. collected revenue, on-time or overdue payments, and more.
• Pricing teams can empirically determine the products and discounts that are resonating most with customers, to ensure that product offerings are aligned with the value customers perceive them to have.

These revenue intelligence metrics also benefit the communications between teams. Having a single source of truth for the revenue lifecycle enables everyone to work from the same reference pool of data, minimizing the risk that miscommunications take place. In turn, this creates a more reliable experience for the customer, bolstering trust.

Historically, only larger, more mature companies could afford to get these insights. They needed to pay for complex data transformation and warehouse solutions on which to layer BI tools. But the recent emergence of turnkey solutions that offer intelligence across the revenue lifecycle can empower any company to obtain sales to financial close revenue details.

Conclusion

The only way to learn to be a better driver is to have access to a dashboard while you drive. Otherwise, you can only learn from crashes, your car running out of gas, or other major failures. Having comprehensive revenue lifecycle intelligence lets you learn as you go and adjust strategy before jarring end-of-quarter evaluations reveal problems, so you can learn to better address customer needs in real-time, as their needs evolve in real-time.

To learn more about the power of modern billing, visit Nue’s Revenue Lifecycle Intelligence page.