Trust your own data
before it becomes an invoice
You buy from providers and distributors, you charge it on to your customers, and the two sets of numbers live in different systems. CloudBilling keeps every invoice line attached to the source record it came from, so what you purchase and what you charge stay in step. Differences show up while you can still act on them.
Your sources disagree, and the invoice has to pick one
Your purchase invoices come from providers and distributors. Your sales invoices come out of your own billing setup. In between sit usage exports, contract price lists, portal downloads and a few spreadsheets that somebody maintains by hand.
Ask a simple question, such as whether every licence on last month’s distributor invoice is charged on to a customer, and the answer takes days. Each system holds a piece of it, in its own format and on its own cycle. The link between a purchased line and the customer line it belongs to lives in somebody’s head.
So approval rests on trust. Finance rounds off what it cannot explain, sales quotes margins it cannot back up, and when a customer questions a line the discussion turns into who is right. That is the moment an organisation stops believing its own figures.
Every line points back to its source, and differences surface first
CloudBilling brings usage data, provider and distributor invoices, contracts and price lists into one structured data layer. Every charge keeps the reference of the record it was built from, so any line on any invoice can be traced back to what was consumed, what it costs you, and what was agreed with the customer.
Because both sides sit in the same place, the comparison runs on its own. What you purchased is matched against what you charged on, and anything that falls outside is flagged while there is still time to fix it, before the invoice reaches your customer.
Approve on evidence, at the point where a correction is still cheap.
That is also what makes the numbers usable outside the billing team. Finance, sales and delivery read the same figures, with the source behind every one of them, which is where getting your data house in order starts to pay off elsewhere.
Numbers the whole company
can stand behind
“The partnership with CloudBilling marks a milestone in our journey to optimise billing for our diverse cloud services. By automating our invoicing processes, we can focus more on innovation and less on administrative tasks, resulting in greater value for our clients.”
Matthijs van DijkGroup Controller, Cegeka
Frequently asked questions
What does trusted data mean in practice?
That every figure you act on can be traced back to the record it came from. A line on a customer invoice points to the usage record behind it, the contract that priced it, and the provider or distributor invoice you paid for it. When someone asks where a number comes from, the system holds the answer.
How do you check that everything we buy is charged on to a customer?
Purchase data and billing data end up in the same structured layer, so both sides of a line can be compared: what a provider charged you, and what you charged your customer for it. Anything that appears on one side and not on the other is flagged, so you see it before the invoice goes out.
We work with several providers and distributors. Does this still hold up?
That is exactly where it earns its keep. Public cloud providers, tier 2 distributors and your own private cloud all deliver data in their own format and on their own cycle. CloudBilling consolidates them into one structure, so a line spanning several sources is still traceable to each of them.
What happens when a difference is found?
It is flagged with the source records behind it, so you can see what caused it: a seat added mid-month, a discount that was never applied, a resource that was never linked to a customer. You decide how to handle it, and the invoice goes out once you are satisfied.
Do we have to move our whole billing process across first?
The comparison gets stronger as more of your billing runs on CloudBilling, because more of the source data is already in one place. Many customers start with a Revenue Leakage Scan on a single period to see how complete their data is, and take it from there. Talk to our team about a route that fits your environment.
Who does the checking, our team or yours?
Both are possible. The traceability is part of the platform, so your own team can follow any line back to its source. If you would rather have expert eyes on it every cycle, our Managed Reconciliation service compares the provider source files against what CloudBilling produced and reports on it before you approve.
Our PSA already produces invoices and our accounting package sends them. What does this add?
Producing an invoice and knowing what belongs on it are two different jobs. A PSA can generate an invoice, your accounting package can send it, and your distributor can deliver licensing data. The layer that connects those pieces and works out what should actually be billed is usually the one that is missing. That is the layer CloudBilling provides, which is why this is a billing data and reconciliation question before it is an invoicing one.
Our billing data sits in our PSA, distributor portals, vendor tenants and accounting package. Do we have to bring it together first?
No, that is the work CloudBilling takes over. The data exists already, it simply sits in four places, on four cycles, in four formats, and someone spends the first week of every month joining it up. CloudBilling pulls the relevant usage, cost and commercial data out of those systems into one calculation, reconciles it, applies your contracts and pricing, and exports the result back into your financial or PSA system. Your billing team moves from joining systems to handling exceptions.
Invoice from data you can
stand behind
Talk to our team about the sources behind your invoices. We will show you how every line is traced back to its origin, and where the differences turn up first.
