Monexa Billing September 2010 Release: More enterprise subscription billing features

Our September 2010 Monexa Billing release, also known as v05_20, has been in the works for some time now. It's one of those releases where a few relatively big features arrived at the finish line resulting in the testing and roll-out being very crucial in providing our customers with the features they've asked for all the while making sure we don't disrupt their cash flow lifeblood.

The last few days has been very busy for all of our Development, QA and Operations teams. As of this morning our customers now have access to some new Monexa Billing features:

Automated Product Catalog Distribution throughout your sales network.

Monexa Billing has always supported the concept of selling subscription services through resellers and tracking the sale and subscriber/customer ownership. You can use this capability to model any internal or external sales organization hierarchy and track or report on sales accordingly.  It's great for resellers with other resellers (many of the large distributors like Ingram Micro use their own resellers for example) or for modeling international sales organizations. Because you can create a sales hierarchy, the cool thing is all rolls up so you can look at the data at any level in the hierarchy and see the performance below.

For our larger customers, managing the product catalog became a full time job so we've added the ability for the catalog to automatically be shared throughout your hierarchy.

As the SaaS business slowly begins to adopt channels and resellers we're excited about some of our smaller customers being able to take advantage of this feature.

PayPal as a gateway. Do B2B companies really use PayPal?

Many of our larger customers have multiple payment gateways. They need to be able to route transactions to one of several payment gateways depending on criterial like payment type (Visa versus Mastercard versus Amex), buyer region or even product type.

For smaller companies, just getting a merchant account and access to 1 gateway in order to transact credit cards can be an adventure. Google "getting a merchant account" to see thousands of horror stories and hundreds of companies dedicated to helping you maneuver the maze that is the banking and transaction processing industry today.

For B2B companies, PayPal is more than it appears. They are a complete gateway that allows you to transact credit cards for customers that do not have Paypal accounts. They transact all over the world. Most importantly, your Paypal account is your "merchant account". Quite often Paypal is a great solution for getting started and even for some international payments.

How do you manage your product catalog and pricing?

We have several people at Monexa that have built product catalog based solutions across many industries. What we've all learned is that no matter how good your UI is for managing the catalog, many larger organizations have existing processes for managing pricing. Give them the ability to upload excel based data for pricing changes and they're happy.

While the Monexa Billing API always supported updating the catalog, you can now manually upload price sheets.

Check out the Monexa Billing release page for some more details and the Billing Resource Center to get the updated API guide.