5 Ways Your Billing Platform Helps Your SaaS Scale Fast

Your SaaS business is in scaleup mode and the sales are coming in heavy. Exciting as growth is, it’s important to remember that every new customer comes with new responsibilities.

Without a robust digital infrastructure to accommodate rapid growth, those on the SaaS business model can struggle to support an influx of new customers. That’s when problems start to arise.

• Inefficiencies become bottlenecks
• lack of agility and flexibility becomes lost opportunities
• human errors become revenue leaks, and
• manual business blunders and inaccuracies become angry customers that churn out.

Your revenue operations (RevOps) is a particularly important component of any successful digital transformation. By digitizing and optimizing this holistic approach to guiding customers through their journey with your business, you can elevate the customer experience from beginning to end.

And speaking of the end, though billing is often an underemphasized element of RevOps, the contributions it makes to your entire SaaS operation are undeniable. Businesses that can quickly and easily bill, and rapidly collect from a growing base of customers will do well. Those that can’t, won’t.

However, a good billing platform is about so much more than collecting cash. It also serves as a scalability tool that keeps you agile while your business is in rapid growth.

1. Grow your customer base without creating bottlenecks

Companies put a lot of time and money into hiring smart, capable team members to support their rapid growth. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, the average business invests about $4,129 per job on their hiring needs in the United States.

Of course, hiring the right people is worth every penny spent—so long as you’re making the most of the talent you acquire.

But far too many scaling SaaS businesses are still assigning their skilled finance team members to tedious manual task work, from creating and maintaining subscription accounts by hand to spending hours on the phone performing collections.

And it’s a workload that only expands as your business does, creating bottlenecks and barriers to growth—not to mention it’s a gross misuse of your team’s abilities.

Ironically, for these slow-to-evolve businesses, success can actually inhibit growth at a certain point. Scalability’s hard when a significant chunk of your revenue is going toward just keeping up with new demand.

A digital transformation to a modern, adaptive billing system optimizes business processes, automating tasks that were formerly done by hand. Where it might have once taken days for your staff to complete all the billing processes: create accounts, input billing data, send out invoices, handle ledger reconciliation, keep in line with revenue recognition best practices, etc, these tasks are automated and completed in a fraction of the time with the right billing solution.

And your skilled finance workforce?

Now that they’re not bogged down with invoicing, these team members can finally start to focus their energy and brainpower on higher-level strategic activities that further support your continued growth and success.

2. Expand your customer segments to increase your reach

A flexible, adaptive recurring billing platform also creates opportunities for your SaaS business with a wider range of customer segments. For example, the right platform enables self-sufficiency for down-market customers that require less hand-holding, with features like registration pages or a self-service portal built into the user interface.

On the other end of that spectrum, it also gives your business the time, resources, and robust infrastructure to attract and support contracts for larger enterprises that can pay more.

Adaptive billing software integrates with your CRM to seamlessly take customers and their data through the sales process. It also offering catalog flexibility to allow you to customize subscription options for customers that have more specific requirements.

This is critical to growth and scalability because your business will ultimately need to be able to maximize its appeal if it’s going to reach its full potential.

A sophisticated recurring billing engine gives your team the time and the tools to chase after bigger accounts that take your business to the next level, while still catering to simpler or more entry-level contracts that help you to maintain stable recurring revenue.

3. Evolve your SaaS pricing strategy

By allowing customers to purchase your services or products the way they want to, you open the door for a lot more business.

It’s a pretty simple equation, really. Enterprise-level packaging likely won’t fit the needs of your average consumer.

The reverse is also true.

But it’s equally possible that elements of what you have to offer will cater to a much broader market.

By enabling your marketing and sales teams to devise and extend flexible pricing strategies and unique product packages, you enhance your marketability.

When your billing platform has the catalog flexibility to adjust to all of these with ease, you gain the ability to create unique pricing options in real-time, which will help in the following ways.

• It enables you to attract specific customers: There may be times when you’re very serious about attracting a specific customer or a well-known logo. In that situation, it helps to be able to cater your offerings to their usage and budget needs.
• It helps you go to market faster: SaaS businesses need to be able to adjust their offerings on a dime to respond to the changing market and the actions of their competitors. Catalog flexibility allows you to make important pricing and product adjustments as needed to respond to situations as they occur.
• You can avoid wasting your engineers’ time: With legacy billing platforms, even small catalog adjustments can take time and effort. With an automated billing platform, changes that might have taken hours or even days are accomplished with a few clicks by anyone on your team.

When it comes to rapid scalability, this level of flexibility is invaluable.

As you experience an influx of new revenue, you’ll also be well equipped to get paid faster, thanks to the billing platform’s collections assurance capabilities.

In other words, a good billing platform helps you grow and handle the growth as it comes up.

4. Border-free SaaS billing

As your SaaS business grows, with any luck you’ll likely find your product has found a home with customers all over the world. A comprehensive automated billing platform allows for border-free billing and collections.

Things like taxation can get pretty complicated when you’re doing business in different countries. The right subscription billing platform supports the in-app integration of cloud-based software partners like Avalara or Digital River that make international taxes a breeze for recurring revenue companies like yours.

Whether you’re dealing with foreign currencies, new tax laws, or unexpected payment methods, an effective subscription commerce engine will be able to accommodate the influx of foreign payments.

Software is borderless, and so are the opportunities for growth. With the right tools, you make sure that your business is as well.

5. Reduce billing inaccuracies, revenue leaks, and churn

The right billing platform takes some of the bite out of normal growing pains.

By automating processes that were once done by hand or through more complex systems, you not only reduce workload, you also eliminate a significant amount of human error. And of course, human error can surge as your billing department gets flooded and even overwhelmed with new accounts.

Some billing mistakes can lead to revenue leakage if customers are undercharged, if customers are charged late or not at all, or if customers cancel their subscriptions and churn out because they’ve lost trust in your billing process.

Customers may also churn involuntarily due to mishandled failed payments. A modern subscription management platform also provides reporting and analytics features to help you easily stay on top of aging accounts receivables and hopefully retain those accounts.

By ensuring accurate, reliable subscription billing, you improve customer trust, satisfaction, and ultimately subscription maintenance.

And the time team members used to spend on manual processes is much better spent further enhancing the customer experience.

At the end of the day, retaining your customers helps your SaaS business maintain healthy recurring revenue to support your rapid growth.

Keep your competitive edge

The world of SaaS is growing fast, and you’ve worked long and hard to claim your share of the market. But are you growing as quickly as you could be?

Does your business have the scalable infrastructure in place to support seamless growth? Do your solutions bring the agility and flexibility to pivot and mature without creating friction and pain points? And are you using your team as smartly and strategically as possible?

Updated technology, complete with an automated billing platform as a crucial component of your fintech stack and high-functioning RevOps, is no longer optional. Without it, your costs increase, your business operations slow down, and ultimately, you start to lose your edge and your customers to businesses that are operating more efficiently.