We are pleased to provide you with a summary of our January, 2010 release.
We are excited to announce a new UI for creating accounts (including contacts) and subscriptions in Z-Billing.
If you have not signed up for the upcoming webinar to review the UI in detail on January 11, 2010 at noon PT, there is still time to register! Please register today. For a replay of this webinar, please click here.
Account and subscription creation is now faster, easier and more intuitive. You can now do this in one screen flow and with just a few clicks.
Key usability improvements include:
To save a step, we no longer have a draft status for accounts – an account status is either active or canceled. If you have draft accounts currently, they will remain in draft status. You can still activate these accounts in the same way as you have in the past.
We have also simplified the entry of subscriptions into a single flow. Key improvements include:
For additional information, please also check the Zuora Knowledge Center for step-by-step instructions on how to create accounts and subscriptions. You can access the Zuora Knowledge Center by navigating to the upper right hand corner of the application to click on Help.
You can now specify the date that the cancellation is entered so that you can report on when subscriptions are canceled.
You can also specify a cancellation to be effective at the end of the last invoiced period, in addition to the already existing options.
Cancellations are now tracked as an amendment, which will allow you to roll back a subscription cancellation in cases where cancellations were incorrectly entered.
Zuora now gives you the ability to specify how charges are to be aligned in a subscription. When a product is added to a subscription, you can now specify what behavior you would prefer - you have the option to specify to "Align to Charge", "Align to Subscription Start", and "Align to Term Start". This alignment can be important for users that bill at quarterly, semi-annual, or annual frequencies, and have multiple charges appear in a single subscription. For more information about the specific behavior for each of these alignments, see the Zuora Knowledge Center.
Default charge alignment is specified for each charge within the product catalog, but you always have the option to override and align differently when adding them to the subscription.
If you need to make a one off change to a posted invoice, you can now generate a Word version of the invoice. This allows you to edit your invoice as needed. For example, you may need to change the address for a bill-to contact. You can now generate the invoice in Word format, make the change and then send out again.
You can access this feature by navigating to an invoice and then to More > Generate Word Invoice.
Please note that if you make changes to the Word version of the invoice, the changes will NOT be reflected in Z-Billing (invoice PDF and UI display). As such, this feature is intended for making minor changes to invoices, not those associated with the invoice amount. Making changes associated with the invoice amount on the word document could result in reporting and reconciliation errors.
We have enhanced the export of Invoice PDFs and Invoice CSV files to allow you to filter the contents of the exports. For example, you can now export only invoices that are over 60 days old with an invoice balance greater than $500.
You can access this by navigating to Reports > Exports.
You can now update and create products and product rate plans. With this feature, you will be able to update names, effective dates, and descriptions for both products and rate plans.
You can now delete the latest version of your subscription via the API. This allows you to rollback to a previous version of the subscription and undoes an amendment. You can delete a subscription as long as no charges have invoiced.
If you are using usage and have the rollover option turned on, our billing engine maintains the rollover balance. We have enhanced the Query API call for the RatePlanCharge object so that you can now return the rollover balance.
