Kylie Fuentes explains why legacy billing systems fail for subscriptions and usage-based revenue. Modern billing needs to connect sales and billing, handle customer lifecycle changes like proration and cotermination, automate compliance controls, and turn billing into a customer-facing function to accelerate revenue and cash flow.
Hi, I'm Kylie Fuentes and I lead product for Salesforce, CPQ and Billing. So if you're like many of our customers, the chances are you're transforming and that means you're thinking about things like new revenue models such as subscriptions or usage that really depend on building long term relationships with your customers. The problem is that legacy systems were built for one time purchases and they break under new subscription revenue models. That means you're left with manual complexities that you never planned for. Sales and finance are disconnected and invoices get sent out with errors. That's why you need a new billing system that works for recurring customer relationships. And making this shift is really all about automation. The journey might seem overwhelming to you now, but we can take it step by step. Step one it's really connecting sales and billing together. Firstly, you want to unify sales and finance. Your sales reps need to know what billing information to collect early on and the billing system needs to receive this important data automatically. Step two is really about thinking through your customer life cycle. What you want to do is think about how you're going to handle the ongoing customer relationship. These recurring relationships come with all kinds of new time bound events. How are you going to handle change orders? Or how will you handle coterminated action add ons? With prorated pricing you need a unified transaction billing engine so you can calculate one price during the sales process and rest assured that it will flow through accurately all the way through the order and the invoice. Step three is about mitigating risk and driving compliance. You want to think about taking the manual pains out of this risk and compliance process means automating your rules and controls for pricing and discounts and automating the approval chains that support your policies. Step four is reshaping billing into a customer experience. Touch points in the new billing economy, we have to reimagine billing. It's not just something that is part of finance or part of an ERP system. Billing itself becomes a customer touchpoint. When you bring billing onto the same platform where you manage the rest of your customer relationships. Then billing becomes the function that completes that 360 degree view of your customer. And all this means your business is free to innovate, increasing revenue and speeding up cash flow all at the same time. Visit Trailhead to start learning more or you can browse our YouTube channel for more specific demos and great information about billing. Thanks for joining. I'm Kylie Fuentes. See you next time.
