Billing Management: #1 Billing a Universal Business Routine

Hello,

As the saying goes, "Do the hardest job first." We started with the complex subject of finance and revenue management, which is considered the backbone of any business. Now, let's shift our focus and take a deep dive into this Billing Management, which is equally more challenging than revenue management. In short, billing is the practical side of how revenue actually flows.

Any business's main source of revenue lies in its sales. You may hail from any country, but selling a product or service doesn't really work without an invoice or a payment receipt. Billing is not merely a task during sales; it is proof of value exchanged and the starting point of reliable cash flow. In this opening post, we will look into the common methods of billing that prevail.

One-Time Billing 

One-time billing is the simplest model. In this model, a single payment is made for a product or a service, and the transaction ends there.

 Think of walking into an electronics store, buying a laptop, and paying for it at the counter. You leave the store with your purchase, and the deal is done.

Similarly, A freelance consultant might charge a flat fee for a two-hour training session.  

Once the product is sold or a service is delivered, payment is made, and neither side is expected to do anything else.

This model is widely seen across industries. In retail, every checkout is a one-time bill. In hospitality, booking a hotel room for a single night works the same way. You stay, you pay, and the transaction closes. It's quick, clear, and efficient, though it doesn't guarantee steady revenue unless the customer returns for repeated purchases.

Project-Based Billing 

Project billing works by linking payments to the milestones or deliverables rather than charging all at once.

 A web development company designing a new website might structure the payment in stages: 20% during design, 40% during development and the remaining 40$ upon launch.

Likewise, an IT service form might bill after migrating data, again after testing and finally after deployment.  

Industries like construction and engineering rely heavily on this model. A builder might charge after completing the foundation, again after raising the structure, and finally after finishing the interiors. This approach ensures the client pays as value is delivered while the service provider maintains healthy cash flow throughout the project duration.

Expense Billing 

Reimbursing the actual cost incurred on behalf of the client is all we do in expense billing.

 Imagine a law firm, for instance, adding court filing fees, travel expenses, and documentation charges to its professional fees.

A construction company also shows the client the real cost of cement, steel, or tiles, in addition to labour charges.  

Expense billing is also common in industries like consulting or advertising. An ad agency, for example, might charge its service fee separately but pass through the media buying cost directly to the client. This approach keeps things fair and open. Clients know exactly what they are paying for, and businesses avoid absorbing expenses that rightly belong to the project.

Recurring/Subscription Billing

Recurring billing charges customers at a regular interval, such as weekly, monthly, or annually, accounting for continuous access to a product or service.

 A Video streaming company charges your card every month, and as long as you keep paying, your streaming access continues without interruption.  

But the story changes when you upgrade mid-month to add more screens, downgrade to a cheaper plan, or cancel halfway through your cycle. Should you be charged full price, half, or something in between? That's where things get interesting.

There is no universal rule in subscription billing. A gym membership works differently from a SaaS license, which differs from a magazine subscription. The complexity even lies within the same industry type, as the demand varies from one subscriber to another.

In addition, other entities like trials, addons, pay-per-user, and mid-cycle changes all demand unique billing logic. That's why subscription businesses often rely on an API-driven billing system or a more automated method to manage these complexities dynamically.

Bill beyond boundaries

Each billing model serves a distinct purpose, and businesses are now ready to experiment with different billing methods by blending one-time with subscription-based, project-based with subscription, and so on. Hybrid billing is becoming the order of the day, and businesses should choose the right tool that stays flexible, powerful, and handles complexity.

Zoho Billing is empowered to deliver everything in one place. Whether one-time, project-based, expense-based, or subscription-based, Zoho Billing is the one-stop solution for all your billing requirements. It doesn't stop with just billing; it digests the complex workflow you propose and provides a hands-free solution through its automated billing approach.

Do you agree? Yes?

In the next post, let's examine the biggest challenge in subscription billing: Prorated Billing, which decides how to charge fairly when customers join, upgrade, downgrade, or cancel mid-term.

Stay Tuned! 

• Topic Participants

• Hari Hara Sudhan S

• Sticky Posts

• Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

  Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

• Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

• Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

• Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

• Recent Topics

• No Functional Autosave or Manual Save Button

  Application : Zoho Notebook So I wanted to try Zoho Notebook(On Ubuntu) as an application, I installed the application and went solving my LeetCode problems visually(Drawing mode), at one point the app just stopped saving anything... Every time I tried

• Enterprise subscription support

  My organization sells subscription services to enterprise customers, which is a different model from the consumer subscription model that Zoho Billing has been designed to support and I beleve this capability should be added. An enterprise subscription

• Issue with Creator's IF logic

  Hi, I found the following code produces unexpected results: if(-1.0 < 0.0000000) {       info "True"; } else {       info "False"; } if(-1.0 < 0.000000) {       info "True"; } else {       info "False"; } The output returned is: False True However, the

• Need option to send Package PDF in shipment email (Shipment PDF is missing Lot info)

  Is there any way to automatically attach the Package PDF instead of (or alongside) the Shipment PDF in the notification emails? We really need this feature because the default Shipment PDF creates a blind spot for our customers. It does not display Batch/Lot

• zoho creator view is not present in the workspace and blank reports

  Hi Support,  Users who have "write" permissions keep getting this error for all of our embedded reports all of a sudden. See screen shot below: Meanwhile, my developer permissions account sees a blank screen in view and edit mode as shown in the screenshots

• Customize portal email template

  Can i fetch only first name of the user in portal email template instead of the below code Hi ${User.FULL_NAME}

• Can't we let users decide which options they'd like to add at embed widget?

  It seems embed widget DOES NOT offer a feature, where users can choose options upon subscribing plans. What Zoho has instead, is that admins have to manually create plan with options. How come no one in Zoho dev team never raised issue about usability

• Reupload and rename from one field to another field (file upload)

  Hi Everyone, Sorry, i have question to use invoke url for rename and reupload attachments file to another field. Tested on development mode. Zoho C6. Refer to https://www.zoho.com/creator/help/api/v2/upload-file.html look my error notification. Does anyone

• Printing Multi-Page Reports (PDF Export)

  Hi, I am moving a report from Google's Looker Studio to Zoho Analytics and trying to reproduce the Looker page by page dashboard editing experience. With Google, what you see is what you get when you print to PDF. But I can't seem to create the same experience

• Resume Harvester: New Enhancements for Faster Sourcing

  We’re excited to share a set of enhancements to Resume Harvester that make sourcing faster and more flexible. These updates help you cut down on repetitive steps, manage auto searches more efficiently, and review candidate profiles with ease. Why we built

• I NEED TO NUMBER TO TEXT NO HERE

  =NUMBERTEXT NEEED

• Error: View is not present in the workspace

  When saving a dashboard, user receives a popup with the following error. "View is not present in the workspace" What does this mean or refer to? There is no further insight given.

• Dear Zoho CEO: Business Growth is about how you prioritise!

  All of us in business know that when you get your priorities right, your business grows. Zoho CRM and Zoho Books are excellent products, but sadly, Zoho Inventory continues to lag behind. Just this morning, I received yet another one-sided email about

• Is there any way to send an Excel received by email to Dataprep?

  Every day I receive an email alert with an Excel file that I want to process through a Dataprep pipeline. To do this, I need to: -Save the file to disk -Open the pipeline -Run the pipeline -Update the source -Several clicks to select and open the saved

• Bin Locations

  Dear all, I am wondering if someone has the ability to develop the bin locations option for zoho inventory (integrated with zoho books) Regards, Ryan

• Create and populate a record in an instant: Introducing zero-shot field prompting to Zia's ICR

  A couple of months ago, we upgraded our in-house AI image detection and validation tool, Zia Vision, with intelligent character recognition (ICR). By training Zia with sample images, you could create and enrich CRM records with data extracted from standard

• How to Prevent Users From Skipping LMS Videos in Zoho People

  How to Prevent Users From Skipping LMS Videos in Zoho People Hello Zoho Developers, In this blog, we will quickly look at how you can stop users from skipping or fast-forwarding videos in Zoho People LMS. Zoho People provides a feature called Disable

• Sent mail sort by date disappeared

  Hello, We used to be able to sort the emails by date in the sent folder, but this feature has recently disappeared. Can we bring it back?

• Sync desktop folders instantly with WorkDrive TrueSync (Beta)

  Keeping your important files backed up and accessible has never been easier! With WorkDrive desktop app (TrueSync), you can now automatically sync specific desktop folders to WorkDrive Web, ensuring seamless, real-time updates across devices. Important:

• [Integration Edition] Deluge Learning Series – Custom API with Deluge | November 2025

  We’re excited to conclude this four-month Integration Edition of the Deluge Learning Series: Session 1 – Integrating Zoho Apps with Deluge Using Built-In Integration Tasks Session 2 – Integrating Zoho Apps with Deluge Using invokeURL and invokeAPI Session

• Automate Backups

  This is a feature request. Consider adding an auto backup feature. Where when you turn it on, it will auto backup on the 15-day schedule. For additional consideration, allow for the export of module data via API calls. Thank you for your consideration.

• Tips for Organizing Workflows and Improving Team Coordination in Zoho

  Hi everyone, I’m looking for some general advice on how different teams are organizing their daily work within Zoho’s apps. Our team recently expanded, and we’re trying to streamline how tasks, discussions, and documents are shared so everything stays

• Batch/lot # and Storage bin location

  Hi I want to ask for a feature on Zoho inventory I own a warehouse and I've gone through different management software solutions with no luck until I found Zoho, it has been a game changer for my business with up to the minute information, I'm extremely happy with it. It's almost perfect. And I say Almost because the only thing missing for me (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is the need of being able to identify the lot number of my inventory and where it is located in the warehouse. Due to the nature

• Prevent user from viewing all records?

  I have a report that is meant to be used by vendors to view only the records that are assigned to them. All the vendor information is stored in a separate application, so I need to call a function to get the current user's ID (not the zoho user ID). The report settings criteria doesn't support using function calls, so instead I'm embedding the report in an html page like this: if (thisapp.Global.CurrentUserIs("Vendor")) {       personID = common.getLoggedInPersonID();       query = "Assigned_Vendor.ID="

• Series Label in the Legend

  My legend reads 'Series 1' and 'Series 2'. From everything I read online, Zoho is supposed to change the data names if it's formatted correctly. I have the proper labels on the top of the columns and the right range selected. I assume it's something in

• Zoho Site pages not displaying in iframes

  I simply want to show a Zoho Site page inside an iframe on another non Zoho website. When testing this across many browsers, the iframe content simply does not appear. IE reports that the host does not allow their content to be displayed in iframes. Very disappointing. Is there a way around this please? Here is the URL of the page I would like to appear in an iframe. http://ips-properties-to-rent.zohosites.com

• Zoho Inventory as connector in Zoho Creator

  Hello, It doesn't appear that Zoho Inventory is one of the many built in connectors in Zoho Creator? I see that there are non-Zoho inventory applications that have built in connectors such as Cin7, which leads me to believe that I'm missing something

• Send Zoho Forms Link using Zoho CRM Email Templates

  I have set up Zoho Forms and CRM integration to pre-populate data from Zoho CRM to Zoho Forms. The setup is working fine. I have also created an email template in the Zoho CRM deals module to send Zoho forms links. So when I send an email using that template

• My go to On Load Client Script - Fast, efficient, and works for ALL profiles; Hides everything except initial fields

  This is my on Load client script that I use for Create pages. I use a modified version for Edit and Display pages which you can create yourself using the same basic structure that I will give you below. First up, the script. Below that will be an explanation

• CRM x WorkDrive: File storage for new CRM signups is now powered by WorkDrive

  Availability Editions: All DCs: All Release plan: Released for new signups in all DCs. It will be enabled for existing users in a phased manner in the upcoming months. Help documentation: Documents in Zoho CRM Manage folders in Documents tab Manage files

• Zoho Books Finance Modules Not Accessible in Zoho CRM Mobile App

  We have integrated Zoho CRM with Zoho Books using the Zoho Finance Suite integration. In the CRM web version, we can see the Finance modules (Estimates/Quotes, Invoices, Sales Orders, Items, Payments) and are able to create invoices and quotes directly

• Custom Search using HTM+CSS Snippet

  Suppose I wanted to create my own list view using HTML and CSS snippets inside a Page with a custom search input at the top of the list (not the Search snippet). Without Javascript, is there a way to retrieve a user's entry from that search input and

• Cliq iOS can't see shared screen

  Hello, I had this morning a video call with a colleague. She is using Cliq Desktop MacOS and wanted to share her screen with me. I'm on iPad. I noticed, while she shared her screen, I could only see her video, but not the shared screen... Does Cliq iOS is able to display shared screen, or is it somewhere else to be found ? Regards

• Mass Update of Lookup Fields not possible

  Hello List I've created a custom field for Leads and Contacts 'Current Campaign'. This is very Handy as I can filter leads and then related them to a campaign. Everything ready, but then I realized that mass update doesn't work for lookup fields... a

• Zoho CRM Kiosk Upload Files

  Hello all, We are trying out Kiosks at the moment to see where it can fit best in our business. We are still a bit off in the application but lets say we will sort this out. My question is the following - when I create a Kiosk I can add "File Upload"

• Double opt-in notifications and customizable confirmation messages for your webforms

  Dear CRM Community, We are excited to announce a major upgrade to our Webforms feature. You can now customize the confirmation message shown to your users who double opt-in from your webform and also customize your confirmation emails when they submit

• Has Anyone successfully integrated Zoho and Sage Intact?

  Hey all, We’re evaluating Zoho One + Sage Intacct and I’m trying to connect with anyone who has actually implemented the two together.Specifically, I’d love to know: -- Which functions you kept in Zoho vs. Intacct (e.g., Product Catalog, AR/AP, invoicing,

• Introducing Image Upload Field

  Hello everyone, In this post we will discuss about the benefits and usage of the Image upload field. The field is available for standard and custom modules.  Usage: This field can be used to upload a gallery of images to a record and share the record with peers or customers. The record can be made accessible to users outside of Zoho CRM via Portals, where they can upload the necessary images. Preview, editing, and deleting images: The uploaded images can be directly edited and saved from the record

• Trigger a Workflow Function if an Attachment (Related List) has been added

  Hello, I have a Case Module with a related list which is Attachment. I want to trigger a workflow if I added an attachment. I've seen some topics about this in zoho community that was posted few months ago and based on the answers, there is no trigger

• Free webinar alert on November 19 - Email driven strategies - Master personality based styles

  Hello Zoho Community! Want to make email management easier, smarter, and more you? We’ve got just the session for you! Join our interactive, game-based webinar to discover how Zoho Mail adapts to your personality and work style. Learn practical hacks,

• Next Page