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About Vertice
Vertice is a spend optimization platform that saves companies up to 25% on their SaaS and cloud costs while streamlining their procurement processes with intelligent workflows. Businesses of every size and industry use Vertice to gain clarity and control over their software and cloud spend, and to achieve guaranteed cost savings through advanced automation. Today, Vertice manages over $3.4 billion in contract spend and is the only platform worldwide that empowers companies to optimize their SaaS and cloud purchasing with an integrated, unified offering. Vertice has offices in New York, London, Sydney, and Brno. Learn more at www.vertice.one.
Challenges
Navigating the complex pricing model
Managing Vertice’s intricate pricing components required a robust and flexible system. They needed a solution to navigate this complexity, ensuring accurate billing and providing transparency to their customers while allowing for manual changes as they scaled their operations.
Disjoint, manual billing process
Vertice's billing process was fragmented across multiple systems, requiring significant manual effort from the finance team.
Where any changes occurred, the finance team had to manually update existing systems with customer details, billing dates, and revenue recognition information.
With customer data dispersed across their CRM, Excel, and accounting entities in their ERP, obtaining a detailed overview of their financial performance became challenging.
The search for a solution
Vertice needed an automated billing solution to handle its complex pricing model and billing schedules. Integration with their CRM and accounting software was crucial. They also wanted a solution that provides self-serve capabilities to their finance team to create contracts, so they aren't entirely reliant on engineers to make contract changes.
While exploring other billing solutions, the Vertice team discovered Zenskar. The platform's flexibility in handling complex revenue and billing models was a key factor in their decision to evaluate it further. Zenskar's dedicated support, customization options, and ability to send alerts based on usage thresholds resonated with Vertice's finance team. Another significant advantage was Zenskar's seamless integration with Vertice's existing tech stack.
As Vertice continued their assessment, they were impressed by the platform's finance-friendly UI and the level of control it provided to the team. The ability to create and modify contracts without engineering dependency was a significant draw.
The combination of flexibility, customization, integration capabilities, and user-friendliness made Zenskar a promising solution for Vertice's needs.
Implementation
The Zenskar team worked closely with Vertice to integrate their existing tools.
Zenskar integrated with Vertice's CRM, making it the single source of truth for all contracts. This integration allowed Vertice's sales team to easily define and manage contract terms directly within the CRM.
One of the key advantages of Zenskar was its ability to support Vertice's multi-entity structure. Unlike other platforms, which required separate accounts for each entity, Zenskar supported all entities within a single account.
This streamlined entity management and enabled Vertice to manage billing for pricing intricacies across their global operations.
How Zenskar automated billing and collections for Vertice
Automated contract creation and invoicing
Zenskar's advanced data model enabled the configuration of custom contracts to handle Vertice's billing and revenue requirements.
The seamless integration with their CRM streamlined deal management for Vertice's sales team. When a deal was closed in the CRM, it automatically synced to Zenskar, creating a corresponding contract. When there was a mid-contract adjustment to billing within the CRM, it was added as a line item to the existing contract in Zenskar, ensuring a unified view of the customer's billing.
Zenskar intelligently aligned billing start dates for any billing amendments with the main contract's billing frequency and cycle, ensuring consistent billing cadences. When an amendment occurred mid-billing cycle, Zenskar automatically calculated the prorated amount owed for the remainder of that period and generated a one-time invoice line item.
Instead of sending multiple invoices to a customer each month for various charges, Zenskar consolidated all charges into a single invoice, improving the customer experience and reducing confusion.
Zenskar also integrated with Avalara to automate tax calculations based on customer location. Whenever an invoice was generated on Zenskar, Avalara calculated the appropriate tax components and added them to the invoice. This ensured compliance with US, UK, and EU tax requirements without manual intervention, streamlining Vertice's multi-geography operation.
Impact
Saved 8 hours/month on manual billing
Before implementing Zenskar, Vertice's finance team spent significant time on manual billing.
This included calculating prorations, generating invoices, and managing taxes for multiple jurisdictions.
Zenskar automated the entire process. The platform directly fetched contract terms from CRM created invoices automatically, and sent automated follow-ups before and after sending invoices.
The finance team just had to review and approve the invoices, and Zenskar automatically sent them to customers.
Moreover, the ability to generate a single consolidated invoice for each customer instead of multiple separate invoices enhanced the overall customer experience. Customers received clear and concise invoices, reducing confusion and improving transparency.
