Introducing m3ter's NetSuite integration

Key takeaways:

• m3ter’s native integration for NetSuite is available out of the box and can be configured easily by roles with admin access to both orgs. 
• m3ter serves as your billing transaction orchestrator, providing a comprehensive set of pricing and rating information that feeds into NetSuite – the information your business needs to invoice customers reliably and accurately.
• The integration enables you to achieve “what good looks like” in Accounts Receivable: accurately calculated bills that are easy to understand and flow seamlessly into your accounting processes.

What “good” looks like in Accounts Receivable

m3ter’s focus is on upgrading the monetization capability of B2B software companies.  The role we play is partly about completing the quote-to-cash stack by providing the advanced metering & rating infrastructure needed to support complex pricing models.  But it’s also about unifying the quote-to-cash stack by automating data flows between CRM and ERP systems.  

Your desired Accounts Receivable (AR) set-up would deliver the following:

• Full automation
• Confidence in customer invoices 
• All the information needed for revenue recognition
• Books closed on time

But it’s likely that your actual set-up looks something like this: 

• Contracts and allowances held in Salesforce
• Product usage data hosted in a Google Sheet
• Accounting team manually matches Salesforce contract info with product usage data, calculates overages in spreadsheet, manually inputs into NetSuite, and manually handles Sales orders

This set-up is heavily manual and exposes you to risks associated with bad data and input errors, plus the limited capabilities to process and query product usage data mean you’ll worry about invoice accuracy and clarity, and also about generating the right numbers for revenue recognition.  That places a huge burden on your team, and despite all their efforts you will still likely suffer billing errors, revenue leakage, and poor customer experiences.

How m3ter enables NetSuite

If you are a successful business, you likely already have key quote-to-cash solutions in place – like NetSuite and Salesforce (or another ERP + CRM combo). But to get to what “good” looks like in NetSuite and overcome the common AR challenges described above, you need more interoperability between your quote-to-cash tooling. 

Most accounts receivables systems – NetSuite included – are limited by simple pricing models, supporting simple Sales orders, or recurring/subscription billing at a stretch. m3ter allows you to support these simple sales and subscriptions AND also every other type of complex and usage-based billing you can think of. We handle all the volume scale and rating complexity that NetSuite can’t do, and feed it back into their proven invoicing functionality via our integration.  m3ter enables:

• Billing transaction orchestration – In the same way that the CRM is seen as the “customer master” – i.e. all the details about the customer are owned by the CRM – m3ter is your master of billing transactions. The system provides a comprehensive set of pricing and rating information that feeds into the accounts receivables, transmitting information that your business needs to invoice customers.
• Seamless integration – No need to replace any of the carefully chosen systems in your ecosystem or use up all your Engineering capacity – m3ter integrates out-of-the-box with NetSuite. And if you use another ERP, we have other native integrations and/or an integration framework that makes custom integrations easy.
• Future-proof flexibility – We know your pricing will evolve over time (and we’re all for continual pricing experimentation). However you change your pricing in the future, m3ter can adapt with our industry-leading pricing configuration capabilities.

Getting started with m3ter + NetSuite

We’ve made m3ter easy to integrate with NetSuite. Our native integration for NetSuite is available out of the box and can be configured by anyone with admin access to both orgs. We normalize the data from the start so it can flow seamlessly – regardless of how you’ve set up your pricing. The bill we generate is always consistent and easy to send to NetSuite.

With m3ter, you can send across:

• Calculated bills – send accurately calculated bills from m3ter into NetSuite for invoicing
• Contract identifiers (such as the contract number) - allows you to identify the revenue contract for revenue recognition (ASC606 or IFRS15), including which bills belong to which contract 
• Service period on each bill item – defines the period during which the service was being used, allowing you to accurately recognise revenue
• Usage summaries - provides the usage summaries for bill items to ensure customer invoices are easy to understand.

With this integration you can achieve “what good looks like” in your AR set-up and make the lives of your Billing Operations and Accounting teams much easier.  And it’s future-proof too. Your quote-to-cash stack may evolve as you scale, but even if your AR provider changes in future you will be able to keep m3ter in place and integrate with the new system.  We aim to make things easy not just now, but throughout your scaling journey.

Learn more about m3ter’s native integration for NetSuite in our Docs today, and schedule a demo to see how the powerful m3ter platform can automate your complex billing.