In an exclusive interview with GoodFirms, JK Chelladurai, Founder & CEO of OneBill, shares his background, what motivated him to start OneBill, why and how he created this world-class billing, invoicing, and subscription management software to meet the compendious needs of various industries and businesses with its innovative design, broad features, and flexible yet reasonable pricing.
Based in Santa Clara, USA, OneBill is an intuitive, cloud-based, all-inclusive billing, invoicing, subscription, and revenue management software designed to automate the entire quote-to-cash lifecycle for businesses of various sizes and varied industries. It offers extensive tools on a unified platform with advanced and powerful billing & revenue management solution that maximizes the revenue and reduces costs by avoiding unnecessary revenue leakages.
The OneBill platform offers broad features, including opportunity tracking, quoting, contract management, order management, order fulfillment, inventory tracking, subscription management, consumption rating, taxation, billing, invoicing, payment processing, accounts receivable (A/R) management, and revenue recognition. The software also provides supporting modules ranging from vendor/reseller management to agent commissioning to cover the comprehensive revenue management ecosystem.
OneBill serves customers from 14+ industries with their focus industry/center of gravity in servicing the SaaS, telecommunications, logistics, IoT, and enterprise markets. However, the sectors with a monetization strategy based on a hybrid business model, a combination of subscription and metered usage of their product or service with complex pricing structures, benefit the most from OneBill.
“Our goal is to upraise OneBill as the number one internationally recognized billing and invoicing software and customers’ preference among the market leaders with our amazing functionality, ingenious features, and flexible consumption-based pricing model.”
JK Chelladurai, Founder & CEO of OneBill
GoodFirms interviewed and discussed the detailed offerings of OneBill Software directly with JK Chelladurai, the Founder and CEO of OneBill Software, Inc. JK leads a team of 120+ employees across the company’s offices in the US, Canada, UK, India, and Australia.
Versatile Billing and Invoicing Software
Initiating the interview, JK describes OneBill as a cloud-based billing and revenue management (BRM) solution. OneBill’s BRM platform provides complete visibility into all receivables, allowing businesses to monetize their products/services effectively, accelerates time-to-market to maximize their market and margin opportunities, automates the order fulfillment processes, real-time management of agents and channel ecosystem, and offers a 360-degree view of customer interactions.
On being asked what motivated the company to create OneBill software, JK explains that before starting OneBill in 2009, he worked for Portal Software which developed a billing solution for on-premise deployment only. However, he realized that as businesses were increasingly moving into the cloud world, they were not open to investing millions of dollars to obtain a software license and then spending a few million more dollars on implementation costs to deploy the actual billing solution that meets their requirements. This created a significant barrier to other smaller service providers accessing a solution. So, he saw the need and an opportunity to provide a flexible cloud-based operations support system and business support system (OSS/BSS) solution for businesses of all sizes with varying needs.
JK further adds that while many other billing solutions in the market offered cloud-based platforms, they were yet to infiltrate complex verticals such as telecommunications. Furthermore, these other solutions were focused on the billing needs of those offering purely subscription-based services. Such issues drove them to create OneBill software.
Unique Features and Offerings
JK further elaborates on three key features that particularly differentiate OneBill from other competitor products in the market. Firstly, the software offers a proprietary Service Delivery Platform that enables the billing platform to create and automate workflows to activate any downstream systems so that a product or service order can be orchestrated and fulfilled. Secondly, the advanced Usage Rating Engine can compute layers upon layers of detailed usage data (for example, minutes, volume, etc.) and accurately apply it to a customer invoice.
Lastly, through the company’s Multi-Level Channel Partner Management capability, businesses are empowered to set up multiple tiers and levels of partners across varying geographies, configure unique product catalogs with local currency pricing, automatically ingest and convert a high volume of usage rating data files into error-free invoices, provide partners with the ability to white-label and bill-on-behalf-of, streamline and accurately manage tax compliance and reporting, support flexible settlement definition (including fixed cost, revenue share, profit share, and more), and control the settlement of commissions in real-time.
Further, JK explains that most cloud-based billing platforms existing in the market focus on subscription-based or recurring billing. While this was the dominant pricing strategy a decade ago, there is a trend shift now where consumption-based billing will be the ‘go to’ tactic in the market. According to OpenView Partners, 45% of SaaS businesses adopted usage-based pricing in 2021 (versus 34% in 2020), and it is predicted that 56% of companies will be using this strategy by 2023, Chelladurai highlights.
JK also informs that through the OneBill platform, businesses can easily deploy consumption-based, subscription-based, rule-based, volume-based, overage-based pricing, one-time, and even a hybrid of all of the above. Therefore, the company discovered that many businesses with complex pricing strategies generally approach them for their expertise in this area too.
Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Talking about customer satisfaction, JK clarifies that for OneBill, they measure customer satisfaction based on how much they can automate their end-to-end revenue management without any leakage of revenue and maximize their margin without leaving money on the table. He adds that they have a reliable customer success team to ensure that the customers are satisfied with their OneBill experience. This involves conducting quarterly calls with these customers, gaining their feedback through a satisfaction survey, and promptly responding to any issues.
About customer retention, he further notifies that their customers usually engage in long-term contracts with at least a 2-year term.
Dedicated Customer Support
JK reveals that the company has a Service Level Agreement in place with each customer where they can escalate issues based on four levels of severity. For example, for a small request with minimal business impact, they have a ticketing system where customers can raise an issue, and a member of the company’s support team will contact them within 40 hours. On the other side of the scale, if the issue is mission-critical from a business impact perspective, their technical team will respond to the customer within 4 hours and have a dedicated team member working through the issue with that company daily till the matter resolves.
Besides, to help the customers get acquainted with OneBill, the company provides a knowledge base of written content and video tutorials that users can access as needed. The written content is well-formatted so that users can easily search on a key topic and navigate to the answer they need.
OneBill – The Best Billing and Invoicing Software
“Our vision is to see OneBill adopted in other industries too in 10 years, like membership, retail, and lease management where we currently don’t have a strong presence but need for our expertise in consumption-based billing. Furthermore, in considering our long-term innovation pipeline, we would also like to experiment with emerging technologies such as Blockchain and Biometrics to enhance our solution,” says JK Chelladurai.
With the broad and distinctive features, mobility, and flexible yet cost-effective pricing model that OneBill offers, the company aims to establish OneBill as a popular choice and market leader for businesses looking for reliable billing, invoicing, and subscription management software. Thus, with so much to offer, it is no surprise that annual recurring revenue (ARR) for OneBill in 2021 was in the range of USD 5 million, as revealed by JK Chelladurai in the interview.
GoodFirms researchers have identified OneBill as one of the best billing and invoicing software, the best subscription management software, and the best recurring billing software for its versatile offerings, multi-industry suitability, intuitive interface, and flexible usage-based pricing.
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