Cloud subscription software company Zuora Inc. is betting on the need for real-time revenue management with its latest offering.

The Real-Time Revenue product for Zuora Revenue announced today enables businesses an automatic way to recognize, then reconcile and analyze their incoming revenue with high accuracy. As a result, companies can close the books on a deal on “day zero” while leveraging insights from those transactions to inform strategic decision-making.

The offering looks like a notable addition to Zuora’s armory. The company sells a software-as-a-service offering that’s used to automate businesses’ subscription order-to-cash operations, aiding their transition to subscription billing and then helping to manage those payments on an ongoing basis.

Zuora said companies are increasingly adopting more complex pricing models that incorporate a mixture of onetime, usage- and subscription-based offers. It means the process of reconciling those transactions has become increasingly complex. The time spent on reconciling those payments, and the occasional human error if it’s done manually, can also hamper companies’ revenue forecasting efforts.

Zuora Real-Time Revenue is aimed at eliminating manual reconciliation and the possibility of human error. Within the offering, the Close Process Dashboard works in the background, continuously and autonomously reconciling revenue as it comes in, identifying any errors along the way so they can be resolved by human experts.

What’s more, the platform churns out data in close to real-time, so customers can benefit from immediate real-time revenue analytics instead of using older, close-to-obsolete data. With that, Zuora said, companies can more accurately forecast their revenue.

Karthik Ramamoorthy, Zuora’s general manager and vice president of products, said closing the books has always been an extremely tedious process performed by dozens of accountants at the end of a financial period.

“With Zuora Revenue, real-time close and revenue reconciliation are finally possible,” he said. “Financials can be updated as soon as a deal is booked.”

MGI Research analyst Andrew Dailey said he believes far too many organizations today continue to rely on manual, Excel-based revenue management processes, and that the lack of automation results in numerous hidden errors. “Organizations must be proactive about innovating in revenue management, to create near-real-time, end-to-end visibility of the monetization process,” he said.

The product promises to be especially handy for large enterprises that close on thousands of transactions a day.

“Implementing Zuora Revenue reduced our time to close the books, and now with Real-Time Revenue, we expect to see even more significant time savings that will allow us to focus on higher value activities,” said Cisco Systems Inc. Revenue Accounting Ops Lead Luciana Maddalozzo.

Image: Zuora