You often see blogs from utility companies complaining about how difficult it is to bill people for their electricity and gas usage correctly; the complexity of the smart metering system, and so forth.

Unfortunately in the IT Managed Services industry, things are not much easier. In fact, I’m prepared to say they’re actually much worse.

In my role as Engineering Manager for our Internal Platforms team, I’m responsible for a team of 5 who solely maintain and develop the tools and platforms that we use to serve our customers – from support and case management, to our customer portal, and billing. Most of these platforms are in-house developed or adapted, which allows us to be flexible and innovative.

So why is MSP billing even more complicated than being a utility supplier? Because we’re not just dealing with one smart metering system, we’re dealing with tens of different vendors who all do their billing differently. We’re essentially an aggregator of all of the tech products and services that our clients need.

Each vendor has different billing periods – Microsoft bill from the 25th of each month for example. Sometimes they aren’t consistent either, so we’ll receive data early or late each month.

Sometimes this data is emailed to us, other vendors need us to pick it up either via ancient FTP, or by logging into a portal.

Some of these charges are fixed recurring charges, others are consumption based – such as Microsoft Azure. All sounds pretty complicated right?

Couple this with the fact that each vendor uses different methods of linking a billing record to a particular razorblue customer or contract and the billing process is further complicated. For example, we’ll often need to know which phone number is associated with which client contract so we can bill for call charges.

This means we receive billing data almost daily, covering varying time windows both into the future and in arrears, requiring lots of processing and manipulation – resulting in lots of disparate invoices.

Most ERP systems are not designed for recurring charges either. As you’d expect, we’re deeply wedded to Microsoft Dynamics, but it just doesn’t do what’s necessary, natively.

Our clients would like one monthly bill that encompasses all of their services with us – a seeming impossibility.

The odds are completely stacked against us, and we create client irritation through no fault of our own. We know we’re not alone in this – in each and every bid or tender meeting we attend, a competitor’s billing is raised as an area of frustration. We resonate with these frustrations because we know how difficult it is.

About 12 months ago we set out on a mission to simplify this, with the bold aim of having the best billing in the industry.

We have gradually been building direct integrations into all of our vendor partners platforms using native APIs. This allows us to read usage from these platforms in real time, and means that we can produce extremely accurate consolidated invoices on the first of each month where all billing is aligned to the same period. We can estimate future usage, and can bill for adjustments where necessary. We can also see patterns, for example where a client is using way more of something than usual – and might need some prompt attention. All of this, completely automated.

We’re now entering the final phases of this process, with our remaining vendors due to go live in the next month.

I’m extremely proud of the progress we’ve made, and hopefully our clients will see the benefits of our improved billing process making it a much more seamless and simple process.

– Colm Simpson, Engineering Manager

If our clients would like to learn more or have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Want to benefit from our streamlined billing process? Learn more about our solutions here.