Key upgrades are scheduled and made to the NetSuite platform twice a year. These enhance or add functionality to the platform, bringing new benefits for users. The second release of this year – being rolled out now – has some exciting developments for software companies that will help them to better manage subscription billing, cut their costs and improve their overall efficiency. Here’s a look at what’s new for software companies.
Improved Management for Subscription Business Models
Many software and SaaS businesses sell their products on a subscription basis. One of the features of the latest upgrade enables companies to give their customers access to their accounts. End-customers can view and manage their subscriptions via a customer portal, allowing them to manage their accounts, see their order history, amend their subscriptions and pay their invoices.
There is also a powerful new analytics feature for better insight into subscription customers. This provides software companies with greater intelligence on recurring revenue, customer churn, upsell and more. A standard template is provided, which generates charts and graphs of the data insights, and which can be further customised with extra filters. This is good news for software companies that are looking for investment as it satisfies the due diligence requirements of potential investors, who are asking for more detailed metrics – and at a far earlier stage in the investment process.
In this new release, new functionality means that companies also get more flexibility when subscriptions are created. Billing schedules and terms can be amended before a subscription is activated. So, if changes are required to a customer’s billing, the account can be amended, rather than having to create a new subscription.
Cash Management
New functionality allows NetSuite users to import bank data, meaning transactions can be created and posted automatically. This streamlines the bank reconciliation process and significantly reduces the time it takes, because bank data does not need to be manually and individually matched to each transaction in a company’s own books. This is a critical time-saver for SaaS companies whose products may be relatively low in cost – say, an £8.99 monthly subscription – but where the success of the business model is therefore reliant on having a high volume of customers.
Automated Finance and Accounting Tools
By tapping into new automation features, accounting teams can be more productive or can concentrate on other, more business-critical work.
A new feature in NetSuite 2020.2 that helps with this is invoice grouping. This allows multiples invoices to be consolidated, so that just a single invoice is sent to the customer. The resulting payment can also be split out and assigned automatically to the original invoices. This reduces the amount of manual work needed and helps with cash flow, thanks to its effect on decreasing the days sales outstanding (DSO).
Cross charges between subsidiaries can be automated. The automatic posting of inter-company cross charges again reduces manual tasks and speeds up the month-end or year-end close process.
Another new feature allows companies to offset mutual inter-company open balances and automatically generate netting settlements, reducing the number of open transactions and again reducing the manual labour needed to manage them.
Are you on the board of a software, SaaS or internet company? Aside from this new functionality, NetSuite has lots of other benefits for software companies, which can efficiently drive your business, as well as facilitate growth and international expansion. It’s no wonder that software companies like DuoLingo, zendesk and DocuSign trust NetSuite to power their businesses. If you’d like to find out more, one of our certified consultants will be pleased to give you a free business consultation or arrange a demonstration. Book an appointment now or get in touch today.
