Tensoft recently released Feature Pack 3 for its revenue, billing and contract management solution, Tensoft RCM 2015. This release provides a number of new features requested by Tensoft customers, and is available both to new and existing Tensoft RCM customers now.
In this blog post, I’ll describe a few of the new features that should be especially beneficial to customers.
Pro-Forma Invoicing Tool:
This new tool gives users a preview of what an invoice will look like before they post it. They can search for specific – or group of – unbilled transactions and print, save to a PDF and then send that to a customer.
In addition, it allows them to easily do a pre-approval process with customers. They can create a batch of renewals, send them to the customer, and then wait for the customer to say, “Yes, I want to renew,” before processing the invoice and sending it to the ERP. The Pro-Forma Invoicing Tool also provides a convenient way to preview what your monthly batch looks like.
Companies with recurring invoices – for maintenance renewals and SaaS subscriptions, for example – will find this feature especially useful.
Deferred Revenue Accounts:
With this new feature, each item can have its own deferred liability account assigned to it. To understand how this benefits system users, think of the two sides of a journal entry when you’re recognizing revenue. There’s the Revenue Account, and then there’s the Liability Deferred Revenue Account. If this is one account number, you can’t have multiple deferred revenue accounts.
While many companies are fine with just one deferred account, others prefer to group their liabilities. One may be for pre-paid maintenance. Another may be for annual licenses, or undelivered licenses. This gives users an easy way to have a more detailed classification of their deferred revenue liability.
This new feature is especially helpful for companies with multiple types of revenue streams – different types of deferred revenue. For example, maybe you have maintenance, SAAS, and long-term licenses – different types of products. This new feature allows you to classify those separately on the balance sheet, giving you more detail on your GL.
Contract Pricing Update Upload Tool and Contract Update Upload Tool:
The Contract Pricing Update Upload Tool allows you to mass update prices for billing, enterprise and usage transactions. This is typically useful for periodic price increases on recurring billings. The Contract Update Upload Tool allows you to upload new billing transactions to existing contracts including billing transactions and enterprise schedules.
Previously, there were two ways to enter a new contract in Tensoft RCM: either manually, or as an Excel upload. The only thing missing was some systematic way to do batch updates to existing contracts, once they were entered or uploaded. An example of this kind of update would be maintenance renewals have clauses to increase 2.5%, or that are based on whatever the latest price/book is at each annual cycle.
The Contract Pricing Update Upload Tool allows you to easily make those changes. You just download the existing contract via Excel, change the price for the ones you want to change, and upload the changes in one batch.
Obviously, the higher your volume of contracts and changes, the more helpful this is to you. If you have CPI indexes – where it goes up based on whatever the government says inflation-wise, or maybe it’s a fixed 2% increase every year – built into your contracts, this new feature could be a big time-saver for you.
The Contract Update Upload Tool allows you to add new billing transactions to an existing contract. Similar to the concept of the Contract Pricing Update Upload Tool, this makes it easy to add ten – or 100 -lines to existing contracts. For example, if you have a big complex contract, and each revision is a new purchase order. And each purchase order has multiple new billing lines – some Enterprise, some recurring – all a new purchase added to the contract. Now you can upload revisions to that existing contract. This can be useful when you’re setting up the system too, in case, for example, you forget to add something to a contract. Just upload the missing information, and you’re set.
If you’d like to learn more about Tensoft RCM, please visit Tensoft’s website, or contact us.