How to improve revenue operations with automated billing software 

Is your team more focused on if money is coming in instead of when money is coming in? 

If your invoicing process isn’t streamlined, you might be stuck spending your precious time pulling data from multiple locations. Or, worse, you completely forget to send an invoice because you don’t have a system in place to remind you when invoices need to go out. 

Or, if you feel like you’re on top of all your customers’ billing activities, do you find it time-consuming to switch between your CRM, an Excel sheet, a Word template, plus some other software solutions -- to get purchase orders (POs) or invoices created?  

Billing problems can significantly slow down your revenue cycle, leaving your customers feeling frustrated and sales teams feeling overwhelmed by the time-consuming work it takes to generate new invoices month after month. 

That’s why investing in automated billing software can increase your sales team’s efficiency, create a better customer experience, and improve your revenue operations (RevOps). Plus—all activities are completed, tracked, and managed in one solution which provides visibility into the process for all necessary stakeholders. 

What is automated billing and invoicing software? 

As your business grows and sales reps start to manage multiple customer accounts, having a digital billing system in place will help ensure that billing and invoicing happen on time.  

With automation, it’s easy to generate invoices, handle approvals, collect payments, and more, with just a few clicks of a button. What’s more, having your automated billing software connected to your CRM allows for records and contacts to be automatically updated, eliminating the need for any manual data entry. The main goal when automating the billing and invoicing process is to streamline this necessary step in your revenue process to allow for greater efficiency and visibility, all while improving your time to revenue.  

With solutions like Conga Billing, for example, your organization can fully automate billing and invoicing activities within your Salesforce instance. Conga Billing allows you to bill for blended business models, including subscription services, physical goods, professional services, and usage-based or consumption-based services.  

4 ways automated billing software can help sales teams improve RevOps 

No matter your industry or business model, there are plenty of benefits when moving to an automated process for billing and invoicing. Here are the top four ways your sales teams will benefit from an automated billing or invoicing solution: 

1. Say goodbye to chasing down payments  

If you are constantly chasing down payments, it’s time to invest in recurring billing software. The bottom line is that chasing down payments is bad for business, and it can drastically slow down your revenue cycle.  

With a disjointed billing and invoicing process, you could be sacrificing the customer relationship by making it a transactional relationship instead of an ongoing experience or journey with your business. Plus, you might come across as pushy and desperate if month after month you aren’t on top of your billing process.  

Don’t sacrifice your professional reputation by continuing to bug your customers for payments. With automation, billing and invoicing activities can happen at the exact moment your company needs to be paid.  

2. Increase billing and invoicing accuracy 

As humans, we are prone to errors. Although mistakes happen, billing and invoicing mistakes can greatly affect the revenue process and your bottom line.  

If your customers’ invoices and bills are riddled with errors and typos, you not only negatively impact their overall experience with your brand, but it erodes confidence in your systems which will hurt your revenue stream. All of this not only causes headaches for those involved, but it is also inefficient and can result in late or even missing payments. 

Your teams don’t have time to constantly check, double check, and triple-check bills and invoices before they go out. That’s why with automated billing software, it’s easy to connect this solution to your CRM to allow bills and invoices to populate in your branded templates—allowing for consistency and accuracy every time.  

3. Focus on customer experience 

Your customers do not want a difficult billing or invoicing process. The more complicated the process, the more likely your customers could build resentment and ultimately stop using your service.  

When your sales teams are overly focused on chasing down payments, tracking activities through multiple, disjointed systems, and fixing or reworking errors, that takes their precious time away from ensuring your customers are happy with your service.  

It’s time to stop sacrificing your customer’s experience during the billing process and free up your sales teams to focus on developing and building their relationships with your customers. You might notice that once your billing and invoicing system is automated, it’s easier to upsell or cross-sell your services to your loyal and happy customers. 

4. Easily track and manage billing and invoicing activities 

If you are still stuck sending bills and invoices the old-fashioned way (think through snail mail or email), then you’ve completely lost visibility into this important process.  

Billing and invoicing are a critical part of the revenue process and it’s essential to have visibility into when bills or invoices were sent. Without this visibility, it could be difficult to predict when payments will actually come in, catch when payments are late or completely missed, or even keep track of when you sent (or if you sent) the invoice. 

With invoice management software, your sales teams can track the entire process all within your CRM. A single-platform solution like Conga Billing allows visibility into all billing and invoicing activities in your Salesforce CRM. Not only will you be able to track where you are in the process, but you can even automate follow-up and reminders so your teams can stay on top of payments.  

How automated billing and invoicing helped a real Conga customer 

Generating POs is an essential on-going business activity for Davies Office™. This independent office furniture re-manufacturing business, located in the United States, generates about 10,000 POs throughout the year.  

Before implementing Conga Composer, integrated with their Salesforce Sales Cloud, Davies salespeople were tasked with copying all pertinent opportunity information into a Purchasing Administrator to create an Excel-based PO. This manual process took seven steps and an average of three days to reach a finalized PO. What’s more, Davies used different spreadsheet formats and stored those locally on the company’s network which made locating and managing this data difficult, disjointed, and time-consuming.  

With the help of Conga Composer, Davies spends less time creating and sending purchase orders. They’ve gone from creating a PO in three days to now creating them less than eight minutes. Along with saving time, they’ve also found:  

• Cost savings and payback: Davies realized $61,000 ROI annually with a payback period of three days. 
• Time savings and improved efficiency: They reduced their time spent creating and sending a PO from two hours across three days to less than eight minutes, which has improved the efficiency of both the sales team and the purchasing group. 
• Increased user satisfaction: Purchase Admins can now quickly create and send purchase orders with reduced risk of data errors or of sending to the wrong email address. Purchase orders are stored centrally within their Salesforce CRM so everyone who needs access to the documents can find and view the status of any given PO.  

Improve your revenue operations with automated billing and invoicing  

It’s time for your sales team – and your customers -- to enjoy the benefits of an automated billing and invoicing process. Say goodbye to the days of inefficient, disjointed processes and hello to full billing visibility, accuracy, and on-time payments. Plus, allow your teams to focus more on their customers’ needs and journey and less on tracking down payments.  

If you are ready to level up your RevOps and automate your billing and invoicing process, Conga can help. Learn how to drive more revenue, faster, with customer billing and invoices.