The Chief Financial Officer should be a prime force in implementing a best-of-breed billing system rather than building a billing module in-house. While it might seem as if the billing module is simply a problem for the IT group, the CFO sees the bigger picture in how billing can affect not only IT, but also sales, customer support, and executive reporting.

Increase Revenue
By enabling your salesforce to offer custom pricing packages, free trials, introductory pricing and other incentives to both prospective and existing customers, you can increase revenue by selling new products and services to existing customers or offering enticing pricing options to new customers. There is also the opportunity cost of spending development resources on building a billing module as opposed to building new products and services which can enhance revenue.

Reduce Expenses & Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
While it may seem inexpensive to build a simple billing module, you must also consider the ongoing cost of maintaining the code, enhancing it with new features and capabilities, and supporting it if the original programmers leave. And let's not forget about such features as crediting customers whose bills are incorrect. Companies often underestimate the cost of billing mistakes, including internal support costs and reduced customer satisfaction. Automating your billing not only reduces mistakes, but it also save considerable time in manually generating invoices if your billing system cannot dynamically handle a particular pricing option.

Increase Customer Satisfaction & Reduce Churn
By providing more billing and invoicing options to customers and by offering customers the ability to analyze their bill, you can increase customer satisfaction. Because the IT department is not required to customize a customer invoice or to place a special message on an invoice, invoices can be customized as often as you want with custom messages, new offers, announcements, etc. These dynamic bills suggest to your customer that you care about their business.

Balance Sales and IT
The CFO has the privilege (read "curse") of working with both the sales team and development team. They are often in the middle of the battle about the salesforce wanting to offer certain bundling and pricing packages, and the development team that keeps responding that they do not currently have the resources (read "budget") to build that type of billing capability given all of the other development priorities.

Enhanced Reporting
To successfully manage a growing business, executives need detailed reports on revenue trends, which products and services are selling, and even which customers are the most profitable. Averum Billing can offer better reporting tools without the need to harass IT for manually-generated reports. Moreover, Averum's export and web services capabilities make it easy to integrate with reporting tools and accounting software.

>> Continue to Why the CIO should care about the billing system.