A Seamless Billing Solution for Progressive Billing Customers

Firms that handle complex engineer-to-order equipment often need a fraction of the total order booking value from their customers at the beginning of any initiative. The remaining balances are billed to the customer at other milestones, such as shipping of the product and, finally, at the customer acceptance. Since such orders have longer lead times and higher dollar values, milestone billing ensures that firms can have better cash flow and revenue throughout the transaction lifecycle and will not need to wait on lengthy order turnaround times. Customers also benefit since vendor firms are committed to supplying the intended service/product. Without a framework in business applications to support this process, it would be very tedious and manually intensive for businesses to do timely and accurate billing, leading to potential revenue mismatch and leakage.
 

 

Bridging the Gap

Inspirage designed and developed a solution that helps businesses define a billing plan and payment breakdown. For example, a customer may select a plan with a 10% initial payment, 30% due at the point of shipping, and the remaining 60% due when the customer provides the final acceptance of the product. With Inspirage’s Progressive Billing solution, which leverages the flexible features of Oracle CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) and a seamless integration developed with ERP Cloud Order Management, sales teams and order managers can now choose the right billing plan for eligible customers and process the orders accurately and promptly. If necessary, customers can even be associated with more than one billing plan.

The system automatically calculates the right billing amount and line items that need to be included in a quote, and eventually into an invoice. When a specific billing plan is selected on the quote, the quote auto-generates a series of billing lines that capture a percentage of the order booked value, which will eventually be used for invoicing purposes. These lines are comprised of both positive and negative dollar values to help nullify the effect of billing twice.

When the solution is integrated with order management, companies can utilize Order Orchestration rules. The billing lines can be either manually interfaced for invoicing by users (first/last milestone billing) or automatically sent to invoicing when an event occurs, such as shipping to bill 30% of dollar amount upon shipping). All of this is achieved with a click of a button by selecting the right payment terms.

This solution has been built to work with the Oracle CX B2C Module with the Oracle ERP Cloud Accounts Receivables Module. Some key considerations before implementing this solution are:

• Designing and setting up billing plans in CPQ,
• Maintaining consistent key financial data in CPQ and ERP for smooth transaction flow (e.g., payment terms, transaction modes and types),
• Defining billing line items that represent various phases/events in CPQ and ERP,
• Defining order orchestration with different pause types, and
• Defining AR transaction types that need to be associated with specific line(s) for accurate invoicing.

Some best practices for dealing with progressive billing are:

• On-boarding customers with the right billing plan(s), and
• Managing customer account details accurately in Oracle CPQ and ERP modules and keeping them current.

Inspirage can help

With a well-coordinated process for milestone billing that leverages the robust features of CPQ and the order orchestration and invoicing abilities of Oracle ERP, companies are ensured to have simplified transaction processing, and at the same time, smooth and accurate billing. Inspirage’s Progressive Billing solution is already built and deployed at one of leading high-tech manufacturing firms whose operations span various geographical locations in the US, Asia, and Europe.

If you are on the fence about moving to Oracle Cloud due to gaps between your business requirements and Oracle’s Cloud offering, it is possible that we already built a solution to bridge that gap. If we do not have a prebuilt solution to address your challenges, we can customize something to fit. We will do the work behind the scenes, so you can focus on growing your business. Please visit the Oracle Cloud Marketplace to see a complete listing of Inspirage Solutions.

As the Integrated Supply Chain Specialists, with recognition from Gartner, IDC, and winners of Oracle’s ERPM (Enterprise Resource Planning & Management) & Supply Chain Management Cloud Partner of the Year (Global) awards in recent years, Inspirage is uniquely qualified to be your success partner. Whether you are upgrading your on-prem system or have decided to move to the cloud where continuous improvement is built-in, our team is prepared to guide you on your transformational journey. Contact us to learn more.