Share your experience using Zuora

Zuora Billing and Zuora Revenue serve as our main use case for subscription management, invoicing, and billing of the automation, proration calculations, and all the revenue recognition part.

A specific example of how I use Zuora for subscription management or billing automation in my day-to-day work involves complex billing scenarios such as subscription start date changes, subscription term dates, customers on subscription, charges, annual renewals, prorated support charges, charges transfer between customer accounts, reversing of the invoicing and rebuilding, then integration issues with external systems with Zuora. Zuora acts as our main billing engine and is integrated with our internal financial systems and downstream revenue tools.

We use Zuora for our billing requirements, revenue requirements, and whatever comes for order to cash. For this full cycle, whatever things are involved in order to revenue, we use Zuora for order booking and subscription management for our products.

The best features Zuora offers in my experience include flexible subscription lifecycle management and the ability to handle complex billing cycles, amendments, upgrades, and downgrades. Zuora's UI clearly helps with billing periods, charges, and changes to work on this flexibility. Additionally, automated invoicing and proration for charges dynamically calculates prorated charges for any of the term changes or any of the billing lifecycle changes. Automated bill runs significantly reduce manual efforts, which we used to do in our earlier project in this organization itself.

The automated invoicing and proration features have saved our team a lot of time. Earlier, we used to have manual billing for each and every account, but now there are bill runs in place which will pick up the charges according to their dates and it will do a bill run. This significantly reduced a lot of time and manual efforts.

Zuora Revenue supports really good revenue automation features, with well-structured revenue rules according to ASC 606. It integrates nicely with billing for revenue recognition alignment and our other downstream financial systems. Zuora Revenue is also a win-win.

Based on my hands-on experience, there are areas where Zuora could improve, specifically invoicing reversal restrictions. Zuora has limitations when an invoice is already split, making it challenging to reverse such invoices. We spend a lot of time doing research with Zuora support and team members to resolve these issues. Integration consistency issues caused by metadata and version mismatches have been observed with Zuora billing. I also find Zuora's UI slightly dated and feel some important fields are too deeply nested. Additionally, the revenue model complexity requires careful handling because any changes in billing affect revenue. Finally, support documentation sometimes lacks clarity, especially around amendments and invoicing reversals.

We experience some downtime with Zuora quarterly, which also affects latency. On the positive side, since Zuora introduced one-ID, managing user roles has become easier.

I have been using Zuora for almost three years now, and I am working on Zuora platform.

Zuora is stable, but we have observed some latency issues quarterly. Moreover, there are limitations on charges; for example, adding multiple charges to one subscription can become very difficult, leading to lengthy load times for orders and charges, which is quite painful for us.

Zuora is capable of supporting our organization's growth and increasing needs.

Customer support is responsive but tends to be high level. They respond quickly, but the quality of resolution depends heavily on the assigned engineer. For uncommon issues, responses can be generic, and at times, there are no solutions due to Zuora product restrictions.

We used a different tool earlier, and the reason for switching to Zuora is to achieve subscription management efficiency for our order to cash module internally. Zuora enables us to manage subscriptions effectively, making it the primary reason we adopted it.

Zuora has positively impacted our organization by significantly reducing manual efforts, and we just need to keep our data healthy and that is all. Zuora will handle other things. It is a really good practice to have Zuora billing for the order to cash module in any organization.

Setting up pricing, products, and charges in Zuora is really easy.

I observe a significant reduction in manual billing work and fewer billing errors since implementing Zuora. Previously, we experienced many billing errors with our ERP system, but as we stabilize on this platform, we are observing fewer billing errors, apart from using reversal charges. We also have faster monthly close cycles and better revenue visibility than we used to have.

My advice for others looking into using Zuora is that it is a tool that adapts well to other systems, allowing integration with numerous systems. If anyone wants to implement a proper order to cash module and transform their organization with subscription management, Zuora is the best choice.

Zuora is excellent, and there is just a little space for improvement. I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.

My main use case for Zuora is as an administrator, where I provide user access and remove access from users who have left the company.

A quick specific example of a task I have done recently in Zuora involves going to Zuora, accessing the repository, providing access to the user, and adding their email ID. There is a new Zuora update, which is the latest one, and that is the only change in Zuora login now.

The best features Zuora offers are that it is user-friendly and not complicated. You simply go to login, go to the users, and add or remove users without much complexity.

The simplicity of Zuora helps me in my daily work as it mostly does not take more than five minutes to add or remove any user, which saves us time to focus on other work.

Zuora has positively impacted my organization as it is primarily used for financial records, including billings and other business needs for the business team. The specific outcomes and improvements my organization has seen with Zuora include that the reports are on time, it is online integrated, and it gets updated nearly every hour through auto-updates from the bank reconciliation and accounts with account details of the company.

It would be beneficial to have an improved dashboard.

I have been working with Zuora for nearly three years.

Zuora is stable.

Zuora's scalability is good as it is easy to use and can handle growing needs easily.

I do not interact with customer support for Zuora. We raise support tickets instead.

Neutral

Before Zuora, we used Oracle.

I have seen a return on investment with Zuora as it saved time.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing are managed by the company management, not by me.

Before choosing Zuora, we evaluated other options including SFDC Billing and RevMart.

Zuora is up to mark as of now and is good for user-friendliness and for the business as it gets updated every hour.

My advice for others looking into using Zuora is that it is a good tool for business use to get real-time data for the financials.

My company is a partner of this vendor.

I have provided all the information and found this interview to be comprehensive with no changes needed for the future. I would rate this review a 9.