Billing is one of the most important technologies for the future of your business. I know … lots of tech categories say that. Here’s why billing tech is so powerful: With rapid reinvention and relentless innovation on our doorsteps, firms need billing technology that enables — rather than hinders — their adaptability, creativity, and resilience (the pillars of what Forrester calls future fitness) and thereby leads to wins in the ever-changing decade ahead.

As a digital business leader, you may not think that billing technology is within your purview, but if your business is undergoing or experiencing any of the following changes, you’ll need to champion how new or updated billing technology is key to success:

  • Changing business model. If your billing technology can’t recognize that new monetization strategy, that new customer type, that new channel, etc., then you will be stuck managing workarounds or finding yourself unable to adapt as your business’s strategy needs you to.
  • Prioritizing new product launches. If your billing technology requires too much custom development or unintuitive configuration, you will not be able to keep up with the creative solutions that your sales and product development teams design and develop.
  • Making or managing acquisitions. Your acquisitions may be using their own billing technologies, so you may look to consolidate what you’re using in house. You’ll need to analyze how the acquisitions’ business models challenge what your existing billing technology can manage easily.
  • Buckling under the weight of manual billing processes. Some older billing tools can’t even manage simple automated renewal reminders, let alone an autorenewal process. Perhaps your business is finally realizing that it is leaving money on the table or that modernizing your billing technology will yield operational efficiencies.

The latest Forrester Wave™ evaluation on the billing market published in late March. We focused on 10 significant firms in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) recurring billing market: Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Chargebee, Gotransverse, Oracle, Recurly, Salesforce, SAP, Stripe, and Zuora. The results are the culmination of five months of research: in-depth briefings, surveys, demos from the vendors, and crucial conversations with customers of these solutions about their strengths and weaknesses.

Forrester clients can read the report and access the Excel-based vendor comparison tool here. It’s important to remember that clients should adapt the criteria and the weightings (and, indeed, even the vendor list) to fit their individual needs. For further insights, Forrester clients can also engage with me directly via an inquiry or guidance session. Clients and nonclients alike can also engage with me on LinkedIn.