The ability to quickly and accurately bill your customers is essential to any business. While Dynamics GP does have functionality in this area, it wasn’t giving us all the tools we needed….so we built our own solution: the Subscription Billing Suite, to expand GP’s functionality. Here are four specific challenges that it solves:
Complex Billing Scenarios
Our product gives you the ability to build a billing schedule for each customer that allows you to specify the frequency at the line item level. This means that you could sell a combination of one-time items, monthly plans, quarterly service calls, etc…all on one invoice! This is a huge improvement on the native GP functionality which forces you to select the frequency at the header level. In addition, we also support metered items, so if your billable amount will depend on an external factor, such as the number of support calls, or the amount of GB consumed, these amounts can be imported into the system, and used to calculate the invoice.
Invoice Generation
Once a contract has been set up, there’s no need to remember who needs to be billed and when; the system handles it all for you. When it’s time to prepare an invoice run, you simply go to the Invoice Creator screen, and create your batch, and our product will generate all of the required SOP Invoices, whether it’s 10, 100, or even 10,000. Contracts can be setup with an auto-renew capability, resulting in a true evergreen billing system, and eliminating the risk of revenue leakage.
Deferred Revenue
If you sell any sort of annual maintenance or warranty with your products and services, that amount obviously can’t be recognized as revenue upfront, but that’s where another aspect of our product comes into play: Revenue and Expense Deferrals. You can setup a recognition schedule for specific items, which will most commonly be 12 months Straight Line. For example, if you bill an annual service contract for $1200, our product will automatically create a 12 month deferral schedule of $100/month for the next year. Unlike native GP, we do not post this upfront, but rather it will post them when needed, so you don’t have to open/post to future periods. We can also handle more complex scenarios such as Milestone/Percentage of Completion schedules – these are most commonly used with Professional Services engagements.
Reporting
Do away with all of your Excel reports tracking your revenue streams! We include several reports to automate this process, most notably our MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) report, which provides an overview of your new sales, upgrades/downgrades, and customer churn. Additionally there are deferral balances and waterfall reports which give you (and your auditors) insight into exactly what makes up your current deferred revenue balances, and shows how they will be converted to revenue over the life of the contract.
When you are ready to improve your current Billing and Rev Rec processes, please contact me and I’d be glad to setup a discovery call to see if our product would be a good fit.
Brian Morris
Account Manager – Binary Stream
With 15 years of experience in the ERP space, as a publisher, reseller and ISV, Brian loves to help organizations unlock their full potential via technology and training.
