by Clement Wang

The major thrust of our September release contains a continuation of a larger initiative that we’ve been rolling out over the course of this year – Payment Operations.

The major focus of Payment Operations is to allow subscription businesses to have complete control and visibility into all billing and payment transactions. Once an invoice is issued there are many situations that can need to be handled beyond just simple payments. Situations that Zuora customers often encounter include:

• “We forgot to enter usage, need to void this invoice”
• “Customer sent a check for more than what was owed”
• “I want to add a late fee to this invoice”
• “I want to issue a credit that the customer can use in the future”
• “I am cancelling this service and want a refund”
• “I don’t want to pay for this charge because…”
• “I want to pay this invoice using a check”
• “I paid with the wrong credit card”

Zuora’s Payment Operations functionality allows subscription businesses to manage these requests and gain complete visibility into the payment lifecycle.

• Support key payment scenarios including check overpayments
• Control refunds and credits for specific charges
• Utilize credit balances instead of issuing a refund check
• Improve customer satisfaction by managing all invoicing exceptions
• Empower non-Accountants to manage daily operations

We’ve rolled out many major pieces of this functionality earlier this year, including refunds, line-item adjustments (credits), improvements to our payment functionality, and enhancements to our accounting integration.

With this release, we’re overhauling our existing Invoice Adjustment capabilities to improve usability, simplify integration with accounting and other systems, and allow for easier reporting. Major changes we’re making in this release include:

• Improved user interface – the users who enter day-to-day transactions are typically not accountants, although these transactions have a major impact on accounting and financial reporting. By improving the user interface (making it consistent with other transactions in our system) we reduce data entry errors and
• New API – We now allow programmatic creation of Invoice Adjustments using the Z-Commerce Platform. This will be useful for data migrations, integrations, as well as for companies that might have customized workflows or policies around their adjustments and credits
• Simplified data model – we’re modifying our existing data model to combine multiple data elements into a single object. This data model is more consistent with other transactions in our system (such as Payments and Refunds), which makes accounting integration and reporting much easier. Of course all existing data in the system will be seamlessly migrated for all customers.

Learn more about these features and others in our new release at our Live Monthly Release Webinar on Thursday, September 16 at Noon PST. Click on the link below to sign up:
http://info.zuora.com/September2010CustomerWebinar.html