Zuora’s August, '10 Release allows Z-Customers better control, and improved transactional support and reporting

by Clement Wang

 

It’s that time again… This month we continue the strides we’ve been making on configurability, usability, accounting reconciliation and reporting. I’ve highlighted a few of the key features below:

 

Custom Invoice Item Sorting: Invoices are an important communication vehicle for our customers and can have a huge effect on customer satisfaction and even collections rates – so it’s important to make sure that they reflect exactly what you want to communicate. With this release, we enhance our invoice templates to allow much greater control over the sorting of invoice items. For example, a customer with multiple subscriptions may see their invoices sorted by subscription first, then by product, and then by date. Or, they may wish to show all recurring charges first, with usage charges following. With this new feature, this level of control is now made available to users to easily configure and assign across the customer base.

 

This is especially important for Zuora customers with complex price plans like Jessica Huber at LiveOffice.

 

Improved Support for Evergreen Subscriptions: Across our customer base, we see huge variation in how subscriptions are defined. For example, many of our customers run “termed” subscriptions, which end after a specific pre-defined period. Other customers manage “evergreen” subscriptions which never expire, unless they are cancelled. Evergreen and termed subscriptions often differ greatly in terms of how they are managed from a customer, the processes that are built around them, as well as the metrics that are tied to them.

 

Zuora customers like MyEmma and Syncplicity can now take advantage of our improved support for evergreen subscriptions, allowing them to more clearly differentiate evergreen from termed subscriptions and better supporting the unique metrics and processes that they use for these subscriptions.

 

Payment Operations – Invoice Item Adjustment: As part of our ongoing Payment Operations initiative, we are making the process of adjusting an invoice for things like customer credits easier to enter and reconcile with accounting systems. Supplementing our existing Invoice Adjustments functionality, adjustments can now be explicitly made to specific items on the invoices. For example, if an invoice has a $100 one-time charge, and a $50 recurring charge, plus an invoice item for $5 in taxes applied to the recurring charge, you may now specifically adjust out the $50 recurring charge along with the tax item, automatically tying the adjustments to the appropriate accounting and revenue recognition codes. These transactions are easily rolled up to allow for easier accounting reconciliation and reporting.

 

This level of tracking will be especially important to verticals that have complex bills and a strong need to report on transactions for regulatory or financial reasons, like Zuora customer OpenRange, a Telco provider who uses Zuora to bill for their highly complex services.

 

Custom Fields on Refunds: When refunds happen, it’s important to track them closely to optimize policies to manage them closely. This is why having great flexibility around tracking refunds and reporting has been important to Zuora customers like Box.net who can easily spot trends, segment their refund activity, and use this intelligence to improve their operations

 

Check out our New Feature page:
https://www.zuora.com/company/subscription-management-new-features.html

 

Learn more about these features and others in our new release at our Live Monthly Release Webinar on Thursday, August 12 at Noon PST. Click on the link below to sign up:
http://info.zuora.com/FY11Q3-AugustCustomerWebinar-NewFeatures.html

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