Billing Software

Paul,

It's not clear from your note if your company has telco-like requirements for billing. If so, may I suggest you carefully define those requirements before you look at any software- I would tend to refer to billing as front office and the rest of your accounting as back office-broadly speaking.

That said, here are some pointers:
1. do you need usage based billing? how do you collect and process usage data?2
2. how do you rate the usage to create a billable amount?
3. what taxes are applicable to which billed services? Is it just sales tax, or do you have to handle various telecommunications taxes?
4. what is your revenue recognition set of rules? how often to you have credits and rebills that can affect the deferred vs earned amounts booked?
5. what invoice presentment requirements do you have? Aggregated, detailed, customer defined formats?
6. Multi currency?

Where will this company be in 3-5 years?

Regards

Len Green

Thanks for all of your commments. I've looked at Intacct but I'm worried that the company's billing complexity won't be met by their software, but I will look again. Len, we have our a proprietary usage program, but have various levels of billing terms and that's where the software seems to come short. We're going to run some scenarios through Aria and see how it performs.

I agree with Len's comments that you should first assess your requirements
and then do your comparison shopping. There are so many products to choose
from you might as well get the one that is closest to exactly what you will
need and always be sure to consider future needs to allow for growth. Take advantage of free demos and if you tell one vendor which other vendors you
are considering, they will point out the flaws in the competitors' product
that you might overlook in your own assessment of the product's features.

This might be more than you need, but if you are considering an integrated system that includes full financial accounting including complex billing...
might want to look at Deltek Costpoint which specializes in Project accounting where each Project can be set up to be billed uniquely, even for same customer.
This is the system I am most familiar with but have no comparison info to share.

Good luck!
Teri

If you’re currently using manual processes like spreadsheets as the foundation of your strategy, gathering and analyzing information is extremely time-consuming. Choose a billing and invoicing software solution with an accounts receivable dashboard that gives you instant access to data to help you monitor and measure accounts receivable performance. The billing software dashboard should summarize important performance indicators such as: goo.gl/eeC3VQ

Percent of overdue receivables
Average time to receive payment per invoice
Accounts receivable turnover ratio
Average days receivable
Current A/R aging by invoice date
Average days to pay
Current days sales outstanding and a view of the 6 month DSO trend
A cash summary
Top delinquent accounts
Summary of collection activities