Does your business sell usage based services?

Common usage based services in the Telco and MSP space include:

• Voice – Mobile phone plans, VoIP and Unified Communications, Inbound etc.
• Data – Internet plans, Fibre etc.
• Utilities – Energy, Water etc.
• Software – Office 365 licences, Backup and security licences

If your business sells any of these services, you could be missing out on hundreds if not thousands of dollars in unbilled revenue every month. This is because usage billing is notoriously tricky, and there’s a lot to consider such as:

• New service activations – When a new service is activated, is the client being billed from the exact moment the service is turned on?
• Churn and cancellations – When a service is switched off, is the client being billed for the pro-rata charges of their service up until the exact point it was switched off?
• Early termination fees – Is the client still in contract? If so, has an early termination fee been added to their account?
• Upstream usage charges – Have your upstream suppliers charged you the right amount for your usage? We’ve seen many cases of clients being overcharged without realising it.
• Billed usage – Are you billing your clients for their full amount of usage?

These amounts add up. In fact, one of Emersion’s Service Delivery consultants Chris Michaels regularly finds that clients he works with are missing out on recurring revenue. In one case he identified a single client with tens of thousands of dollars of missing revenue that had not been billed for.

We recently spoke with Droyt Robb from Emerge Internet, who revealed that around 5-10% of their monthly revenue was going unbilled every month!

How Emerge used Emersion to captured additional billing data which now accounts for 5-10% of their revenue.

Finding unbilled revenue with Emersion

The margins on usage based services can be low, so every cent counts. Emersion has extensive functionality to help your business capture the maximum share of your clients wallets including: 

• The ability to set custom sell prices for any usage services. These are always higher than the buy price, ensuring that the services you sell are profitable. 
• Automatic collection and calculation of any usage and pro-rata charges. These are automatically aggregated onto your clients invoices ensuring that the full usage amount is calculated every time. 
• Audit and margin analysis functionality that, among other things, can help to identify instances where you are being overcharged by your upstream carriers. 
• Integrations to telco carriers, vendors and distributors to minimise your data entry requirements and lower your chances for data entry errors to occur. 
• Upsell and cross sell opportunities through online sign up portals (e.g. selling an additional modem with an NBN service) and advertising space on invoices. 
• The ability to add late payment fees to overdue accounts. 
• Quarantine functionality to help identify services that need human intervention

Book a free assessment today

Ready to see if you could be making more money by selling telco and other usage based services? Book a free 1 hour assessment with one of our consultants today.