Revenue Management: How Clever Automation Can Deliver a Big Return on Investment

When it comes to revenue, it pays to keep a very close eye. 

For telcos, Value Added Resellers, and Managed Service Providers, that can often be a tricky business. Multiple solutions, multiple pricing structures, multiple partners, multiple customers – tracking who pays how much for what and when can all add up to a significant challenge. 

Crucially, being able to do so to a globally-recognised standard not only improves organisations’ ultimate ability to collect their own revenue, it can also serve as a potent differentiator when it comes to attracting new customers. 

After all, the existence in a supplier’s workflows of any automated process acknowledged as predictable, reliable, and efficient – particularly in the complex technology space – is surely a big tick in a big box. 

Partnering with the right provider is therefore hugely important. 

“There is nothing more important to any business than its revenue – having tools and processes in place capable of improving its collection, protection, and, ultimately, stimulating its growth, can deliver significant return on investment,” says JK Chelladurai, Founder and CEO at leading global end-to-end revenue management experts OneBill, which has recently added a new module to its smart billing platform.   

OneBill Revenue Management (ORM) enables a business to track and recognize its revenue accurately based on global standards such as ASC606 or IFRS 15. It provides a five-step process to define the rules for tracking revenue and recognizing them based on a contract definition. 

Step 1: Identify the contract with the customer 

Step 2: Identify the Performance Obligations (POB) in the contract 

Step 3: Determine the transaction price 

Step 4: Allocate the transaction price to the Performance Obligation 

Step 5: Recognize Revenue when the Performance Obligation is satisfied 

Users set ‘Revenue Recognition’ configurations as follows: 

Accounting Calendar

Enables users to define a financial calendar for their business. Transactions sent to ORM are recognized against a specific accounting period. 

Performance Obligations (POB)

A promise to deliver a service based on agreed terms. A POB defines the point in time when a transaction is to be considered in the ORM layer, and how and when the revenue from the transaction is recognized. OneBill allows a user to define multiple performance POBs and tag the relevant POB to the relevant product. 

Contract Grouping

Enables users to define the parameters under which contract data is grouped. For example, a business may choose to add all transactions and orders into a central Revenue Contract or, alternatively, each transaction and order can go into its own Revenue Contract. Contract grouping is based on a set of elements: ‘Product/Plan’ enables a user to group transactions based on the properties of a specific product or plan; for example, all VoIP products. ‘Subscriber’ lets a user group their transactions based on subscriber properties. ‘Order’ groups transactions by properties in an order; for example, a PO number. ‘Subscription’ groups transactions by subscription parameters.  

Contract Modification Rules

Every business has its own way of identifying what is a new contract and what is a change to an existing contract. ORM provides the ability to define the rules under which a contract is defined as new or changed. 

The OMR also has a ‘Revenue Run’ section; enabling administrators to trigger the processing of transactions coming from the billing/order system. It shows the status of all previously-processed transaction batches based on Bill Number, Bill Line ID, Bill Date, Bill Amount, Order Line, and Processed Transactions. 

All in all, it’s a smart, powerful and user-friendly module that adds further value to OneBill’s end-to-end revenue management offering. 

To learn more about how OneBill can help you and your partners’ businesses automate complex and time-consuming billing, payments, collections, revenue recognition, and reporting, click here