What salesforce billing can do to improve your sales and finances

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Sales and finance can be one of the most important pairs in a company if they are well integrated. Each one feeds the other, showing the image of a solid and well-organized business. However, articulating the multiple processes that occur in these areas and making them flow smoothly between them can be a tremendous challenge.

To ensure that your company does not experience this scenario, Salesforce, the world's number 1 CRM, has developed several solutions that you should know about. We have already talked about Salesforce CPQ, an interesting tool for optimizing configuration and pricing, as well as quotes. Now it is time to delve into another part of the process through Salesforce Invoicing.

What is Salesforce Billing?
Salesforce Billing, as its name suggests, is a CPQ add-on specialized in billing. It integrates invoices, payments, and revenue into a single data source, allowing companies to manage and bill their customers for unified subscription-based and usage-based products. In this way, it optimizes service delivery and the payment experience. Likewise, internally, it improves both communication and collaboration between finance, sales, and other departments.

How does it work?
Although this billing process is sometimes seen only through china whatsapp lead invoice and payment papers, the revenue life cycle actually begins from the first contact with Sales.

Revenue life cycle
While the first three stages Opportunities, Quotes, and Contracts are the responsibility of the Sales department, they actively influence the invoicing process. After Sales completes its part, it will generate contracts and orders that allow you to start invoicing. This is where Salesforce Invoicing comes in, managing the order, invoicing, and collection stages. This solution will allow you to streamline the cash collection process. How? Take a look at its main features.

Key Salesforce Billing Features
Payments and payment allocations to invoices: allows you to track payment methods and channels, offering flexibility to the client in this process. In addition, it can be integrated with the main payment processors to schedule payment runs, automating invoice balances. In addition, advanced accounts receivable functions allow flexible allocations at the line item level, providing greater precision in the collection process.
Refunds and Invoice Adjustments: Provides flexibility to manage adjustments to a customer's balance or accounts receivable, whether by adding fees or credit to invoices, correcting errors, or canceling a service.
Accounts Receivable: Provides detailed viewing of accounts receivable. It also offers reporting features that can be easily customized to the needs of each company.
Claims and collections notifications: streamline and automate claims processes for collections of overdue invoice balances.
Benefits
Without a doubt, the fundamental benefit of Salesforce Invoicing is its ability to optimize one of the pillars of the company: finances. However, looking deeper, we can cite more specific advantages.

Provides reliable, accurate, automated and human error-free billing.
Reduce the collection cycle, improving your company's cash flow.
It allows you to establish, through subscriptions, recurring relationships by managing all types of income, changes and additions.
Allows for quick and flexible billing adjustments for the client.
It displays on a single screen, an interactive, simple and intuitive interface.
Why integrate CPQ and Salesforce Invoicing?
The real question is why separate them. As we discussed earlier, the revenue lifecycle starts with sales. Salesforce CPQ makes it easy for sales reps to set up, price, and prorate quote items. It also helps sell the right product bundles, controls discounts, and automates approvals. This results in a contract and a quote. When the order is placed, Salesforce Invoicing inherits key records and information from CPQ, allowing it to generate the invoice and related transaction records.

Lead-to-cash process in Salesforce
Source: Salesforce.com.
In other words, since sales and finance processes are interdependent, Salesforce CPQ and Invoicing were created to work together, complementing each other. The advantages of this integration are:

Streamline your billing process by properly quoting, honoring the contract, and properly prorating order amounts using Salesforce CPQ. Also, by applying appropriate credits and discounts, billing goes out quickly and smoothly.
It eliminates a large part of the errors resulting from recalculation and duplication of information. It allows the creation of a single source of information. In this way, the data flows smoothly through the stages of the revenue life cycle.
Improve sales performance, as Salesforce Billing is designed to leverage the CRM’s AI engine. This enables accurate forecasting of revenue, annual contract value, cash flow, and other key performance indicators.
Strengthen customer relationships by automatically linking customer billing records to their Salesforce profiles. This strengthens the 360-degree view of each customer by providing the necessary information at all times. In addition, it provides a fluid and positive experience throughout the entire sales and payment process.
Both Salesforce CPQ and Invoicing solutions complement Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms by collecting and converting lead order data into transactional data that serves the entire enterprise.