by Clement Wang

It’s the second week of the month, which means that it’s time again for the next Zuora release.

This month we are rolling out the next major release of Z-Force, along with major improvements to Z-Payments. Here are some major highlights:

Z-Force Quotes with Renewals

Z-Force is our 100% native integration with Salesforce.com and continues to one of the most heavily used modules. This release takes makes major improvements to the Z-Force Quotes module, allowing users to:

• Create customer-ready quotes
  • Sales and customer relationship managers have full visibility into customers’ existing subscriptions as they create renewals and upsell orders
  • Price changes reflected in the product catalog can be automatically reflected in the quoting process to take effect upon renewal
  • Simple point and click interface makes extension and modification of any subscription a breeze
  • Sales team members and their customers can automatically see the impact of the changes to the subscription on future billings
• Keep Orders Synchronized with Billing
  • One-click order activation to automatically reflect renewal orders in the billing cycle
  • Order and Billing status are instantly accessible to all authorized users in SFDC
• Collaborate seamlessly across sales, support, sales operations, finance, legal, and accounting teams
  • Full support of Chatter, allowing appropriate users to be collaborate on any product and price changes, changes in order status, billing, or payments
  • Internal users can view all customer subscription and billing data, including quotes, orders, subscriptions, invoices and payments

This upgrade of Z-Force Quotes supports Renewals as well as any upsells or change orders that may accompany renewals.

Payment Operations: Credit Balances and Improved Usability: This month we put the finishing touches on our Payment Operations initiative which allows users to manage the entire set of transactions that are typically encountered by subscription businesses (including payments, refunds, invoice item adjustments, invoice adjustments). With this release, we introduce the ability to hold a credit balance on a billing account.

This feature allows users to:

• Accept and track overpayments
• Transfer an invoice with a negative balance to the credit balance
• Apply a credit balance to an invoice
• Automatically account for credit balances when processing payments on invoices
• Refund credit balances to end-customers

Best of all, this feature is fully integrated with the rest of our payment operations functionality. Our improved user interface allows users to easily understand the invoices outstanding on an account and any transactions that affect the invoice. Invoice charges are grouped by subscription for easy tracking, while tax details and discounts are associated to each invoice item to clearly show relationships to individual invoice items.