Customer Accounts
In this section, you will learn about Customer Accounts in Zuora.
About Customer Accounts
The Customer Accounts module is a single, centralized place to manage all billing information about your customers, such as company and contact information, payment terms, and preferred payment methods. For each account, you can view the complete history of all subscriptions and amendments, transactions, including invoices, payments, refunds, credits, adjustments, and the key metrics for that customer. You can also perform common tasks, such as creating new subscriptions, invoices, payments, and adjustments.
Key Concepts
Here are the key concepts to understand when managing customer accounts in Zuora:
- Creating customer accounts: You can create a customer account in several ways. You can:
- Use the Zuora Billing user interface.
- Issue a subscribe call with the SOAP API from your website.
- Use the REST API's Create account call.
- Perform a quote-to-order-to-renewal using Zuora CPQ, a native Force.com application.
- Key Metrics: Gives you a quick insight into an account's status, including the total Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) for all subscriptions, the invoice balance, and the last invoice date for the account.
- Contacts: As part of account creation, you will create a Bill To and Sold To Contacts for your customer account record. The contact record contains information that you will need for billing. You can add an unlimited number of contacts, but you must select one contact as your Bill To and one contact as your Sold To.
- Billing and Payment Terms: This section controls when and how a customer is billed, as well as which payment gateway and payment method is used when processing payments for the account. This is also where you can specify which invoice template should be used if your company utilizes more than one invoice template for billing.
- Subscriptions and Amendments: Subscriptions are used to track your customers' orders, and amendments are the changes made to those subscriptions, such as a change to the price, quantity, or add-on orders.
- Transactions: Transactions include customer invoices and the actions that affect invoice balances (payments, refunds, adjustments, and credits).
- Usage: Usage-based fees are used to track resources that are metered and then charged for based on the amount consumed. Examples are database storage space or bundles of emails sent.
Additional Resources and Activities
To learn more about Customer Accounts:
- See the documentation on Customer Accounts and Creating a Customer Account.
- Access your company's test account on the Zuora API Sandbox and create a new customer account and contacts.