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Diversity Analysis, an independent consulting group that specializes in SaaS, cloud computing, and business strategy, recently published a report that includes 10 questions any online business should ask of its billing infrastructure.

I found the entire analysis worth reading and would like to highlight here a few quotes that reflect what many of our existing and potential customers have been pointing out are especially important to their business:

• The need to be able to react to international taxation rates and laws, international currency issues, diverse payment methods and multiple languages are all factors that need to be taken into account.
• In a business to consumer (B2C) operation, it is entirely possible that a business may have hundreds of thousands of customers and hence millions of billing transactions – scaling for subscription billing is therefore far more complex and time consuming than for traditional product companies who generally invoice on a one-time basis.
• Of all these regulations, it is most critical that the billing solution is compliant with PCI. It is important that not only the infrastructure housing the billing solution is secure but also the flow of financial data, thereby ensuring data security standards.
• Specialist and comprehensive billing systems are built to automate many parts of the billing and subscription process and in doing so both save money (in terms of time savings) and drive extra value (in terms of increased customer retention).
• Similarly a billing and subscription service should be seen as a core part of the customer relationship management operation. It should give the business sufficient visibility into a customer’s needs to enable targeted marketing by way of up-selling or cross-selling.

The billing infrastructure wields a significant effect on your business, as Diversity Analysis emphasizes in its report. In an upcoming post, I’ll go into some numerical depth on the value of CashBox for our clients.

You can download the report here.