As companies grow, their invoicing processes have to resolve an increasing variety of factors. This is especially true for international billing, cross-border payment operations and companies that utilize the increasingly popular usage-based pricing models.
Automated billing is crucial to modernizing B2B billing processes, as it helps streamline the process of sending out recurring billing notices and integrating with billing and accounting software.
Riya Grover, co-founder and CEO of a UK-based startup that operates as a “financial router,” joins Converge to discuss its approach to solving this issue. Tackling pricing and billing problems, Sequence has successfully raised capital and secured investments from Andreessen Horowitz and Salesforce Ventures.
Read on to explore the future of B2B billing and learn how Sequence builds flexible price configurations, order forms and automated invoicing, then captures the data to drive more revenue automation.
Automated invoice software in the contract-to-cash process
Many sales teams work off antiquated systems that rely on manual entry of offline data to reflect a variety of contractual terms. These data points are shared with financial teams and then go back to the sales team and, finally, on to the prospective clients.
Grover says these workflows can be inefficient and prone to user error. Automated invoice processing can significantly streamline these operations by reducing the procure-to-pay cycle, eliminating human error and customizing workflows for improved productivity and efficiency.
“Ultimately, companies want to reduce manual effort and build more automation across their business,” Grover says. “So if you think about the way a lot of B2B companies operate today, these activities across the contract-to-revenue process are pretty siloed. There’s a lot of duplication of effort.”
Invoice processing automation addresses these challenges by eliminating manual data entry errors, speeding up the approval process and enhancing overall efficiency and accuracy.
Access to digital records and more data also enables companies to gather critical information about clients that can support upselling and opportunities for more accurate calculations of commissions for sales teams.