Overview
Users utilizing the billing system and Partner Center were frustrated with its simplicity. At the time, sending and creating invoices was all a user could do when billing through the platform. While helpful, more experienced users are accustomed to having more flexibility and control when scaling revenue and finance for their businesses.
Approach
Grow and mature the billing system through new features to account for the primary ways our users bill their customers. As such, we'll work closely with internal and external stakeholders/users and lean on competitor analysis to provide the best possible experience.
Subscriptions
Most users order and sell products that require recurring payments over a period. On the platform, users were required to create invoices manually every time they sold a product.
Subscriptions automatically create invoices for those products recurringly. They also give more visibility on what a user is paying a vendor if they order and resell a 3rd party product to their customers.
Findings
Decrease in manual labor
Users adopting subscriptions were spending less time creating invoices for recurring payment and sold products
Billing flexibilty
Users were more likely to adopt subscriptions due to it's flexibility when billing customers, such as discounts and tax exemptions etc.
Credit notes
Since reconciling is a part of revenue and finance, credit notes are standard in most billing platforms. Before credit notes were implemented in the billing system, users could not update or credit inaccurate invoices sent to their customers, causing escalation for them and our support team.
Findings
Decrease in voided invoices
When sending an incorrect invoice, users were less likely to void the invoice and send a new one
Refund and revenue transparency
Exporting credit notes gave users more visibility on where payment and refunds went when reconciling revenue