Awesome Billing Overview

💰 Billing & Payments knowledge for cloud platforms

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💰 Awesome Billing

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Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
— Yuval Noah Harari[1]

Any company needs at one point to get money from customers. That's when things gets messy for us developers, as we try to reconcile the complexity of the business with our software stack.

This Awesome list helps software engineers bootstrap billing & payments systems, and make sense of invoicing, pricing, accounting, marketplace, fraud and business intelligence.

Contents

Basics

In a Stanford class providing an overview of cloud computing, the software architecture of the platform is described as in the right diagram →

Billing is one of the transversal pillar of the ecosystem, where customers, products and business meets. The other pillar being Identity and Access Management (IAM) 👤 (⭐1.4k).

This highlight the strategic importance of the domain, not only for cloud providers but virtually any business, especially those who are software-centric.

Pricing

From monthly subscription to commodity-like on-the-go consumption, there's plenty of scheme out there to structure your product's pricing. Including the good old shopping-cart funnel.

Usage-based Pricing

The dynamic scheme for elastic resources.

Subscription Plans

Highly popular for SaaS businesses, subscription plans are easy to comprehend.

Hybrid

Uncommon pricing schemes.

Strategy

Theory and practical insight to help you choose the right pricing tactics.

Market Research

Survey methods and price discovery techniques to find the right price point.

Product Catalog

The central repository of all available services, products, variants, options and pricing available to the customer to purchase. Catalogs for cloud services are most of the time tailor-made, but there is some classic PDM solutions (Product Data Management, a.k.a. PIM for Product Information Management) out there that might fit the bill.

Calculator

Simulate a virtual invoice depending on the resource you plan to use.

Cost Forecast

Help your customers predict their upcoming and future consumption based on their past usage.

Marketplace

A marketplace connect supply with demand that lead to a financial transaction. If there is no payment involved, then it is an aggregator, or a hub. Not a marketplace.

Cloud Resources

This sub-section focus on bid/ask mechanism matching resource producer with consumers. Most of the time these are one-sided markets with the big platform trying to amortized under-utilized inventory.

Online Ads

Targeted online advertisements marketplaces have a lot in common with traditional cloud marketplace. Some good inspiration there, from concepts to tech.

Accounting

Double-Entry Model

The core concept of accounting is double-entry. It is the most critical part to grasp in order to properly design any robust system that tracks money.

Bookkeeping

Everything you need to know about the daily practice of keeping your accounting data clean and tidy.

Software design and implementation

Now that you're somewhat familiar with the concepts and practice of accounting, here are some resources to help you implement that knowledge into software systems.

Currencies

Global companies needs to know how to juggle between local currencies.

Finance

Once you've got your accounts in order, you can start extracting insights and metrics from your financial data.

Contracts

All the invoicing terms & conditions are materialzed by the contract signed between the end-user and the service provider. That's the source from where we derives all the rules of the billing cycle.

Coupons and Vouchers

Taxes

European VAT

Invoice

The invoice materialize a consumed service or purchased product, waiting to be settled by a payment transaction.

Structure

Integrity

Once issued, an invoice must be immutable.

Generators

Extractors

Electronic invoices

Payments

Receipt

A receipt materialize the payment transaction.

Credit Cards

The most popular payment device.

Bank Accounts

The old-fashioned way of payment: by the way of banks.

Online Payments

The usual money transfer services.

Fraud

There's monetary incentives to exploit your business. Be prepared to fight hordes of fraudsters and shady users.

Cards

The majority of fraud is exploiting the most common popular payment device: credit cards.

Trust Score

Synthetic score based on a collection of signals are often the best proxy of user's trustworthiness. Customer support most of the time rely on them to take action when these actions are not triggered automatically.

Statistics

Best tools to automate fraud detection.

Billing

UX/UI

Users gets easily angry when it comes to money. UX and UI might helps a lot to reduce frustration.

Business Intelligence

As stakeholder of the billing pipeline, you sat on all the critical data to measure and report on the health of the business.

Metrics

Definition and collection of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) worth monitoring.

Customer Lifetime Value

How much net value do you produce per customer? The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV, or LTV for Life-Time Value) quantify that. Understanding and acting on it is the most important part of your business's sales efforts.

Data Engineering

To industrialize data production and consumption, your need data engineers to clean up, persist and consolidate data. Only after you get these data foundation you might think of onboarding data scientists.

Tools

Software to build visualizations, dashboards, SQL queries and drill down into data.

Competitive Analysis

A bunch of resources to keep track of the current status and progress of all companies operating in the domain.

Cloud providers

History

Humour

Billing is not funny.

Contributing

Your contributions are always welcome! Please take a look at the contribution guidelines first.

Footnotes

The header image (⭐711) is based on a modified photo by Denny Müller.

[1]: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper, 2015). [↑]