TRACT helps companies automate billing, increase revenue, identify customer trends, and deepen customer loyalty. TRACT users can make information-driven decisions based on customer activity that positively impacts business results.
The way customers are buying products and services is evolving from one-off purchases to simple subscriptions to more complex, activity-based models with greater appeal to business and consumers. Your customers want choices! With TRACT Billing, you can adapt your billing plan as customer preferences shift, while optimizing revenue capture and preventing profit loss.
Subscriptions allow for a business to sell periodic (monthly, yearly, etc.) access to products or services. This business model can help to create recurring revenue and brand loyalty. Subscriptions can be a solid, lasting business model for many industries.
TRACT can easily handle subscription management and recurring revenue business models. Within TRACT, purchased products are instantiated on the customer’s account as services. The collection of services for a given customer is known as the customer’s service hierarchy.
Not only can TRACT bill for subscriptions, the system allows you to change the terms or actions associated with a service (e.g., define the cancellation policy, apply specific charges for a given service).
In addition to charging and billing for activities or recurring subscriptions, TRACT enables the invoicing and monitoring of one-time purchases. A one-time charge could be defined as the sales price for a product, or a defined agreement for a service. Using TRACT, sellers can define how long access for the product or service should be allowed, and if the customer is able to rollover any unused portions of one-time purchases to subsequent billing cycles.
If rollover is allowed, TRACT also offers businesses an option to display unused balances of those one-time purchases on invoices.
For example, a customer who purchased a one-time package for 10 GBs worth of downloads with no expiration will now be able to track consumption of that 10 GBs of downloads monthly on their invoice.
Key to accounting, monetizing, and billing for activities or subscriptions is a robust rating engine with a sophisticated rules-based algorithm for determining pricing for usage. With TRACT’s advanced rating engine, you can accurately bill for anything measurable.
Transverse works with our customers to set up business rules as part of the on-boarding process.
TRACT allows for the definition of agreements on the product level. These agreements define the discount or promotion terms, the duration, and the definition of highly flexible termination fees. Discounts or promotions could be monetary or percentage based, fixed fees or calculated based on the time left on the terms of the agreement.
TRACT also includes a robust set of features to create and manage coupons. Coupons can be used to create discounts and build loyalty through dynamic promotions (similar to those from Groupon or LivingSocial). With coupons, you motivate people to purchase or engage in ways they otherwise might not. Coupons can also be used to provide powerful loyalty programs.
With TRACT, you can manage the complete coupon lifecycle (from the time a coupon is made available to its expiration). TRACT simplifies the process by providing redemption either manually via a web-based UI or automatically via the web services API from your point of sale system.
TRACT gives you the option to split a product charge into smaller increments and assign a schedule for the disbursement of those charges. For example, a $100 annual fee could be divided into four $25 charges that are each applied the first day of a new quarter.
In this example, the charge amount is applied to the customers account on the scheduled date, as opposed to showing a balance owed. Users can configure TRACT to include any number of payment dates for a scheduled charge.
The total value of all scheduled charges must be equal to the total value of associated product charge.
TRACT can be configured to support price lists and marketplaces that enable a business to maintain a single product catalog but set multiple commercial price lists based on characteristics (e.g., reseller, distributor, regional sales territories, countries).
Using this functionality, TRACT can be configured to charge customers specific rates based on their profile. This eliminates much of the confusion that can arise when businesses with complex channel distribution and pricing structures move to an automated billing platform.
How your business anticipates, recognizes, and responds to the changing business dynamics and customer preferences is a competitive differentiator.
Knowledge is power, and with TRACT Billing analytics, you get detailed business intelligence and customer insights in real-time.
All financial transactions in TRACT are recorded based on their source - invoice, payment, adjustment or accrual (deferred revenue) - and the user defined posting rules.
The daily G/L aggregation simplifies the integration with the external financial (ERP) system by taking all individual financial transactions per G/L account and aggregating these on the G/L account level.
TRACT boasts a configurable dashboard designed to help marketing, product management, and operational users readily parse, compare, and analyze real-time customer data with easy-to-use graphical widgets.
Standard dashboards in TRACT provide users easy-to-understand views of activity-based revenue and subscriber information. Standard reports and dashboards include views into: revenue, customer, order, accounting, and bill cycle details.
TRACT can also be used to build custom reports by business view. The report builder and dashboards are intuitive and easy to use. In just three steps, business users can glean insight and make better informed business decisions.
When billing is integrated with CRM/ERP systems, businesses can increase sales velocity and diminish the time to cash. TRACT provides a comprehensive set of features that help to process orders once entered.
Use the TRACT Billing platform to automate actions based on specific triggers. TRACT’s configurable Action Framework serves as the backbone of personalized automation. Using the Action Framework, you can setup TRACT to perform tasks in response to activities that occur within the system.
For example, use the action framework to automate the following:
TRACT allows for the definition of agreements on the product level. These agreements represent customer commitments and define the terms of the relationships, the duration, and the definition of any termination fees as well as what happens at the end of the commitment.
You can define what happens at the end of the initial agreement period. Options include subscription and activities continuing on a month-to-month basis, automatic renewal of the same agreement, upgrade/downgrade to a different product, upgrade/downgrade to a different agreement with different terms or suspension of subscription and activities.
Renewals as well as upgrades or downgrades are tracked to allow for customer insights and analytics for churn reporting.
Product managers use a product catalog to maintain product information and pricing for all products and services offered. TRACT’s highly configurable product catalog allows for multiple product configurations, services, terms, and prices to be offered to your customers.
Once configured, TRACT can send or create queries for these details to your CRM, ecommerce suite, or registration solution so that the product details can be conveyed to the end customer.
By centralizing your product catalog in TRACT you can avoid redundant data synchronization or outdated pricing details.
Regardless of how you price or bill customers for goods and services, you need a process to ensure customers get what they pay for — and only what they pay for — to guard against revenue leakage.
TRACT Billing provides a robust platform for processing activities and entitlements to help you grow profits and satisfy customers.
Essential to any business model built on activities or subscriptions is the management of entitlements. This process reviews a user’s information in real-time to ensure a requested activity is authorized and allowed, which optimizes revenue capture and prevents profit loss.
Without proper management, entitlements can become unwieldy. To prevent revenue loss or customer frustration, businesses need a system that ensures each customer has access to the parts of an application, good or service to which he or she subscribes.
In billing, an activity is also known as an event, and how these activities or events are defined and charged for is known as event handling. Using TRACT, customers can process events using our rating engine.
While event handling is quite common in costly legacy systems designed for vertical industries (e.g., telecom), few cloud-based billing systems allow for this sophisticated charging activity.
This allows TRACT users to accept an incoming event, identify the correct customer and their current allowance, as well as rate/price plan, correctly calculate the charge for this activity, and apply the charged activity to the customers account.
Allowances are updated in real-time - and can be queried by external system via API - and charges are reflected under “pending charges” until the next invoice is generated for the customer.
TRACT is designed to power the new device-driven economy and enable activity-based billing for device as well as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, also known as the Internet of Things.
TRACT helps you track and bill for high-volume activities associated with devices and helps prevent against revenue loss by blocking access on unauthorized devices.
Device information and inventory can be uploaded into TRACT with our web-based resource management UI. The device management interface allows users to search for, change, upload or deactivate devices in the system. Devices may be associated with subscribers and/or products within TRACT. And of course you can define one-time, recurring, or activity-based prices for a specific device.
TRACT helps you set up rules that determine how customers are allowed access to and charged for activities or usage. This is known as policy control, and generally takes the following forms:
Manual billing can be a significant drain on operational resources and can limit a businesses’ ability to grow rapidly. Not only is the process time-consuming, there’s huge potential for error.
With the TRACT automated billing platform, you can rest assured knowing that invoices are accurate, delivered on time, and paid according to defined rules.
Invoices are tools for personalized communication and effective marketing, and are often the most and sometimes only recurring interaction with customers. Accuracy and timeliness of invoices are critical to the customer experience.
The detailed billing data from the TRACT billing engine enables the generation of either a very simple invoice, or highly complex invoice documents. Invoices can be generated based on a pre-determined cadence.
TRACT generates customer-specific invoices based on available templates. In addition, customer-specific templates can be created. Invoices can be distributed via email using TRACT email distribution, or saved as PDF files for printing and mailing, or online viewing purposes.
Along with automating billing and invoicing, TRACT can complete the step with payment processing. TRACT includes several payment processing options: automatic payment processing, manual payment processing, and recurring or one-time payments.
TRACT is integrated with top payment processors like Authorize.Net, Chase Paymentech, CyberSource, FirstData, and PayPal. Lockbox files can be imported for any incoming cash or check payments and assigned to the corresponding invoices. TRACT is PCI DSS level 1 compliant and ensures full security and encryption of your customers’ financial data.
Satisfied customers are essential to the success of your business. So it is essential that customers have easy ways to correct billing errors or account profile inaccuracies. TRACT Billing has you covered there.
For most businesses, income is recognized as revenue only when the company delivers its product or service and receives corresponding payment. However, this can be difficult to properly calculate with a recurring activity or subscription revenue model.
Finance professionals, faced with ever-increasing demands on them, need the tools to be able to manage this issue.
TRACT is different because our system was built around this important accounting standard. TRACT transfers deferred revenue to actual revenue accounts using a series of G/L Transaction rules determined by user defined G/L Posting rules. TRACT supports the daily update of accrued revenue.
Learn how TRACT Billing will transform your business. Request a custom demonstration
Multidimensional
Business
Activity and
Order
Invoicing and
Revenue