Emburse provides a portfolio of modern spend management platforms that focus on expense management and AP Automation solutions. The finance team, based in Portland, Maine, manages the billing for its entire portfolio of products. Each of its products use subscription-based billing that combines a contract-based and usage-based process requiring overage tracking in a robust enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Emburse went live with NetSuite in October of 2016, and quickly realized that its billing process was highly manual. The finance team was using memorized transactions to book invoices for all contract-based amounts, and then entering overage charges based on usage in separate invoices to then consolidate into a unified invoice. In addition to being time consuming and prone to errors, this was also creating inaccuracies in its formatting and taxation. More importantly, this process prevented any insight into future revenue and inhibited the finance department from processing invoices quickly and efficiently. Emburse understood that in order to support its projected growth, it would need to optimize how it tracked and billed its customers.
Charted, formerly SquareWorks Consulting, assisted Emburse with the design and implementation of SuiteBilling to create a scalable and efficient billing solution to support its portfolio of expense management and AP automation products.
Emburse turned to Charted to help determine a solution, after its successful track record working with Emburse on several other NetSuite optimization engagements and ongoing NetSuite support.
After a diligent assessment of how to best optimize the billing process, and exploring different products and alternatives, Emburse made the decision to move forward with implementing NetSuite’s flagship billing solution for subscription-based billing and hired Charted to assist with the implementation.
How Charted helped
Charted worked directly with Emburse to design and configure SuiteBilling for Emburse’s specific use cases. Working closely with the company to tailor the implementation, Charted was able to ensure that the process was going to meet Emburse’s specific needs regarding project design and timeline to implement the solution.
Project at-a-glance
- Assessment of business needs and billing structure
- Solution planning and preliminary design
- Integration development and testing
- Delivery of tailor-made billing calculations
- Implementation and go-live
The process that we had set up for billing initially was not a scalable solution. Charted was familiar with SuiteBilling and our business case, it helped us determine this was the ultimate solution to our unique needs.
Danielle CamarataCorporate Controller
Solution design
In order to deploy this product, Charted assessed Emburse’s billing structure for each of its solutions and evaluated how to best design the SuiteBilling solution in its NetSuite environment. Emburse has multiple item types including recurring subscriptions, one-time costs for items like implementation and setup, and usage-based billing for overages. Each of these components are billed and priced differently including monthly, quarterly, annually and semi-annually. SuiteBilling helped automate the usage calculation, billing, revenue recognition, and renewal.
In addition, Emburse was able to take advantage of Interval Pricing with SuiteBilling. This feature allows for different pricing during the subscription term, where the first couple of months can be free and then the customer is invoiced for the recurring amount. All of the pricing is handled with multiple currencies (USD, CAD, GBP, AUD, EUR) as well. By using SuiteBilling, Emburse was able to move away from memorized transactions and consolidated invoicing, ultimately saving time and further customization.
Once the billing solution was developed and deployed to the sandbox, Emburse’s finance team was given a breadth of testing scenarios to ensure the accuracy of this module. The testing process was detailed and specific to its use case, instilling confidence in Emburse’s NetSuite users. The solution testing was built to break down the billing structure for each of Emburse’s solutions and allow the team to practice how it would be translated into NetSuite with the guidance of Charted.
I truly enjoy the automation of it, with Charted we are able to configure each of our subscription options across the portfolio and we don’t need to think about it again unless we need to change something. Now, making changes to someone’s subscription when they need to be made is much easier than it once was.
Sonya DvilinksyAccounting Manager
Go-live results
Once all the billing structures had been designed and tested in NetSuite, Emburse cleaned and migrated its data into the new module and deployed the new process. It instantly eliminated manual steps for its price tracking and streamlined the billing process as a whole.
“Charted helped us change the billing architecture completely; we went from multiple invoices, manual imports of data, and memorized transactions just to keep track of that recurring billing for the subscriptions, to a solution that was architected to manage subscriptions and easily pull in usage data.”
Danielle Camarata,Corporate Controller, Emburse
To learn more about Charted NetSuite Optimization projects, please click here.
