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Performance Booster

Zuora

Performance Booster

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Companies managing hundreds of thousands or millions of subscriptions have unique needs when it comes to scale. Unlike a B2B company that only has thousands of customers, a B2C or B2A (business to anything) company might have millions of customers, and will need to process invoices, payments, and transactions at a much higher frequency. These companies need to enable efficient processes in order to scale with the high volumes and remove bottlenecks from time-sensitive operations.

The Performance Booster allows customers to scale high-volume processes to meet the demands of peak periods and larger batch operations. Benefits include:

  • Improve operational efficiencies by: 
    • Reducing the need to manage and monitor multiple Bill Runs and Payment Runs in order to accommodate increase in volume
    • Reducing process bottlenecks that impact mission critical tasks, such as month end accounting close
  • Maximize cash flow by:
    • Ensuring invoices get out to customers on time
    • Processing payments within optimal windows of time to maximize payment success 

What is included in Performance Booster

The Performance Booster adds targeted compute capacity and increased throughput within Zuora. Current capabilities in the Performance Booster modules include: 

  • Micro-batch Bill Runs: Zuora’s Parallel Processing Engine uses a micro-batching technique to allow parallel generation of invoices, and hence shortening bill run times. Invoices within a bill run are automatically grouped into smaller batches and processed with greater throughput. 
    • Rating:
      • This impacts rating of Rate Plan Charges and drafting of Invoices.
      • Typically, the majority of processing time is tied to rating and drafting.
    • Posting Currency:
      • This impacts the posting of each invoice following the rating step.
      • While negligible at smaller volume, posting time becomes material as the volume of transactions processed by each Bill Run increases, especially if it involves integration to a tax engine.
  • (Optional) Micro-batch Payment Runs: Zuora's Parallel Processing Engine uses a micro-batching technique to allow parallel generation of payments, and hence shortening payment run times. Payments within a payment run are automatically grouped into smaller batches for greater throughput.
    • Payment Creation: This impacts the initial creation of the Payment.
    • Payment Processing: This impacts payment processing against your payment gateways.

    To improve the payment run performance through multi-threading support, the number of concurrent threads enabled must be more than the number of concurrent payment runs configured for your tenant.

    • The Micro-batch Payment Runs feature is only available in production environments.
    • The best practice is to contact your payment provider to ensure the payment gateway can take advantage of the increased concurrent limit thresholds. For the gateway to provide the required number of concurrencies, you must work backwards from your expected payment volumes per day.
  • (Optional) Higher Data Query Queued Queries Limits: After reaching the maximum number of simultaneous queries, Performance Booster doubles the default maximum number of queued queries, allowing you to process them. For more information on Data Query default limits, see Overview of Data Query. This upgrade is not enabled for your tenant by default. If you want to enable this upgrade, contact your Zuora account representative.
  • Higher API Concurrency Limits: When you purchase the Performance Booster, your API concurrency limits will be doubled, allowing you to scale to more customer operations per second and ensuring that Zuora can grow with you as you grow. Note that this upgrade does not apply to Data Query. For more information about allowed Data Query concurrency limits, see Overview of Data Query.
  • Enhanced Performance in Trial Balance and Journal Runs: Performance Booster reduces the overall time required to run trial balance and journal run. These performance improvements will provide finance and accounting teams with improved operational efficiency, allowing them to close financial books more quickly.
  • (Optional) Dedicated Workflow Workers: If you use Workflow today, Zuora will provide always available resources to support high-priority processing and lower in-queue wait times. For more information, see Dedicated Workflow Workers for Performance Booster.

    For more information on the Performance Booster packages and Dedicated Workflow Workers, reach out to your Zuora account team.

  Growth Edition Enterprise Edition Nine Edition

Performance Booster

Scale high-volume processes in Zuora, including bill runs and payments runs, and raise API concurrency limits.

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Additional capabilities that boost Zuora’s platform performance may continue to be added to these modules as they become available.

Getting started with Performance Booster

Performance Booster is available as an add-on to Zuora Platform for customers on Growth/Enterprise Edition or Silver Platform Edition. Performance Booster is already included for customers currently on the Nine Edition or Gold Platform Edition. 

To start using this module, please reach out to your Zuora CSM. Together, Zuora and your team will look into your current Zuora performance, including, but not limited to: 

  • Avg. Minutes for Bill Runs in past year 
  • Avg. Minutes for Payment Runs in past year 
  • Max Minutes for Bill Runs in past year 
  • Max Minutes for Payment Runs in past year
  • Max time taken for Trial balance Runs
  • Max time taken for Journal Runs
  • Average time taken for Trial Balance Runs
  • Average time taken for Journal Runs

Zuora will continue to monitor your performance against these metrics once Performance Booster is enabled.