As we’ve already commented in previous blogs, one of the most frequent errors that many companies make, regardless of the industry, is to invoice the commercial conditions for large B2B clients with a generic biller (which is usually designed for B2C billing). Unfortunately, these are completely unrelated. Every month it’s crucial to make the necessary adjustments to apply these special conditions offered and to generate customized reports, which involves a high level of manual labor (usually in Excel).
This leads to a number of damaging situations that could be avoided with automation. For example:
—High cost of labor.
—Billing errors that lead to customer dissatisfaction.
—Invoices are issued in an Excel file with little added value.
On the other hand, solutions that are digitized and automated for the invoicing of framework agreements with special price conditions for large accounts achieve adequate invoicing of the customized commercial offer. These solutions also entail utilities to manage inventory and complex functionalities for the invoicing process; (such as the aggregation and consolidation of invoices from several national or international associated operators).
These customized billing solutions also achieve:
- Changing from a traditional investment model in billing systems to a pay-per-use model (Billing as a Service).
- Quickly adapting the billing process to a changing commercial offer.
- Decreasing manual labor, leading to a savings in cost.
- Savings in outsourcing complex billing jobs.
- Reducing penalties for billing errors and decreased business expenses in assisting such claims.
- Decreasing loss of revenue due to dissatisfied customers.
- Decreasing defaults due to discrepancies within invoices.
- Eliminating billing errors.
- Decreasing the billing period, leading to a savings in the financing of current assets.
The BILLnet solution, developed by TEAMnet, can achieve an improvement rate in operational efficiency in productivity of more than 80%, which implies that instead of needing to invest unproductive hours in manual labor to customize the client’s invoices, a few minutes of the client manager’s actions is enough (data after carrying out several measurements on reference clients).
With this automation of tasks, it’s possible to centralize all the information and knowledge of the clients’ casuistry in a system, and not in people.
Apart from generating efficiency in the B2B billing process, the most interesting and novel thing is that with this aggregation of all the client’s relevant information, (consumption, spending, inventory, information on cost centers, budget, organizational structure, and employees) in a system such as BILLnet, (per the client’s request), it allows us to offer the generation of an exclusive differential value in the market. As a result, this provides B2B clients with a self-management portal provided by the supplier company itself, which until now were contracted to service companies. Expense management functionalities include:
- Customized dashboards of consumption, spending and inventory of contracted services and products.
- Benchmark with respect to the spending and consumption data of your sector.
- Management of requests (registrations, cancellations, modifications).
- Download customized reports.
- Status updates of the contracted stock.
- Publication and approval of pre-invoices by the client to avoid misunderstandings and delays in collection.
- Generating and monitoring the expense budget.
The telecom sector is a clear example of what we’ve discussed here because historically, despite the large investments made in systems, there have been many problems in this type of billing and it wasn’t possible to develop an efficient B2B billing system, until now.
At TEAMnet we’ve created a pioneering multi-sector solution that solves these complexities: BILLnet.
Dare to be different? B2B Invoicer