by Clement Wang

Our regular monthly release train rolls on…

This month we are rolling out a major step-change to our Z-Force module, along with our usual assortment of improvements and new features. I’ve covered some highlights below, but for more detail on our new Z-Force click here.

Z-Force 3.0: Z-Force, our 100% native integration with Salesforce.com, has been one of our most popular features among our customer base because it provides the most complete set of functionality for enabling subscription management and billing from within Salesforce CRM. This release takes that even further by allowing users to:

• Create customer-ready quotes for upsells, amendments, and change orders
  • Sales and customer relationship managers have full visibility into customers’ existing subscriptions as they create upsell orders
  • Simple point and click interface makes modification of any subscription a breeze
  • Sales personnel and their customers can automatically see the impact of the changes including complex proration calculations across multiple charge periods and charge models
• Keep Orders Synchronized with Billing
  • One-click order activation to automatically kick off billing
  • Order and Billing status are instantly accessible to all authorized users in SFDC
• Collaborate seamlessly across sales, support, sales operations, finance, legal, and accounting teams
  • Full support of Chatter, allowing appropriate users to be collaborate on any product and price changes, changes in order status, billing, or payments
  • Internal users can view all customer subscription and billing data, including quotes, orders, subscriptions, invoices and payments

Z-Force 3.0 includes a major new upgrade of Z-Force Quotes to support Upsells and Amendments, as well as features that we previously released in June, including Scheduled Sync and Performance Improvements.

Mary Collerton, Director of Corporate Solutions at our customer Reed Business Information loves this module for its “seamless integration between sales and finance for sales quoting and order processing… driving improved efficiency within our sales teams…”

Usability: We spend a lot of time on usability, as making sure our service is intuitive and understandable is a key component to reducing user error and improving operational efficiency. This is constantly reinforced by customers when we roll out new usability features, such as our new subscription and account entry UI in January, and our draft subscription preview in May.

With this release, we have a number of features targeted at usability improvements:

• Subscription Preview on Active and Cancelled Subscriptions: Extending our draft subscription preview functionality, users can now view past and future invoices on active subscriptions. This is important as often change orders and amendments that happen mid-period often cause prorations that may not be easily calculated across charges on complex subscriptions. The preview features allows service and billing reps to have this information at their fingertips so they can see exactly what invoices will be generated across the life of a subscription.
• Expanded Subscription List View: Based on feedback from customers we’ve improved our subscription views to enhance readability. We also present the key information about subscriptions such as CMRR, Next Renewal Date, and Subscription Status to allow users to easily compare and sort subscriptions and take appropriate action.
• Improved Subscription Search: Companies use our custom fields feature to help to classify subscription for reporting and other purposes. Our improved search functionality now supports custom fields, so that subscriptions may be easily found by the custom designations assigned to them.
• Faster Payment Method Entry: We’ve added some default parameters to save users entering credit card or debit card information to cut down their data entry time by up to 70%.
• Simplified Payment API: Usability applies not only to our user interface, but to our API platform as well. We are introducing a new Payments API that greatly simplifies the process of creating payments in our system.