Zenskar is an end-to-end billing system that uses the following modules to solve your billing needs.
Contracts
Think of a Contract on Zenskar as a copy of the Paper Contract that you sign with your Customers. Each Paper Contract in the real world will have a corresponding Contract on Zenskar. Most other billing tools call these Subscriptions or Orders, but are limiting in the flexibility they offer, which you might have experienced if you have used such tools in the past. Zenskar's Contracts are designed to be able to describe almost anything you can describe in English - the only difference is that the Zenskar platform is able to generate invoices by reading the Zenskar Contract fully autonomously.
Metering
Some companies like to maintain the source of truth of usage data within their infrastructure, whereas others prefer Billing to be the source of truth of this data. Zenskar supports both philosophies as first class citizens.
- You would like to maintain the source of truth of your Usage Data within your own Infrastructure
In this case, Zenskar has various connectors that plug into various data sources via which we can pull your usage data into the billing infrastructure. We currently support Postgres, Redshift, Mongodb, APIs with more coming soon. - You would like Zenskar to be the source of truth for your Usage Data
In this case, you can use Zenskar's metering APIs to push data into our system.
Invoicing
Invoices on Zenskar are generated automatically from the Contracts and Meters above. You can fully customize the content and appearance of your invoices using Zenskar's templating engine.
Features/Entitlements
Think of Entitlements as features that you provide your customers based on their Contract. A few examples might illustrate what Entitlements are a little better:
- A customer might purchase 100 hours of compute for $20. In this case, on purchase, the customer is entitled to a 100 hours of compute.
- A customer might enter into a contract corresponding to a "Gold Plan" that you might have. Being on this plan might include 1000 API calls a month, exceeding which the service is cancelled. In this case, every month, the customer is entitled to 1000 API calls.
Payments
Zenskar allows you to connect with payment gateways to collect payments from your customers. These can be collected from customers in both ways - Sales initiated via the Zenskar dashboard, and Customer initiated via your own website.
Accounting
Staying compliant with ASC 606/IFRS 15 is a challenge with the different kinds of contracts that your Sales Team might come up with. Zenskar helps you accurately maintain any Accounts in your Ledger that deal with data coming from Contracts, Invoices and Payments. These could include Accounts specific to your business that might hold any Unearned Revenue that's drawn down as a customer uses your product.
Receivables Management
You can segment your customers based on a variety of parameters like invoice due days, country that the customer belongs to, any custom attribute that you define, etc and use these segment to automate notifications and reminders to your customers. You can also customize any automated outreach using Zenskar's templating engine.