Having spent many years in the Dynamics channel, in both VAR and ISV environments, I have seen a lot of changes in the industry over that time.
When I first entered the channel working at a Dynamics VAR, everything was very project-based. Time tracking, project-based billing, receiving of payments were all straightforward.
Automation wasn’t a key thing we were concerned with when we were billing on a project basis.
As things evolved within the VAR, we started to look at how to build more and more recurring revenue streams. Recurring revenue is where value is really built in a business and was a new concept to many traditional VARs.
Challenge of automated invoicing
One of the biggest challenges when transitioning to this recurring revenue model was how to automate invoicing.
Unfortunately, there were not that many great solutions to help provide this type of functionality.
While there were recurring invoicing solutions for Dynamics GP, they didn’t handle payments – meaning we could generate the invoices on a schedule, and even deliver them to the customer, but we had to manually handle the actual collection of payments.
Add that to the overall collection process, and we found this struggle was less than ideal.
Other solutions that required recurring billing and automated payments were expensive, old, and not fully integrated to the tools we were using to run our business. As a Microsoft partner we were leveraging both Dynamics CRM (pre-Dynamics 365 days) and Dynamics GP. We would manage our sales process and book orders in Dynamics CRM that would be integrated to Dynamics GP. To create a new recurring billing agreement we would have to go to other systems after booking the sale, set up the agreements, and have no tie to our CRM process.
As more and more partners are moving to this recurring revenue model, through CSP or as an ISV, we wanted to make sure ConnectBooster supported these processes with the tools partners are using.
Dynamics 365 for Sales
With that in mind, I am excited to announce the upcoming release of our integration with Dynamics 365 for Sales.
With this new integration, you will be able to leverage the lead to cash process of Dynamics 365, and when placing the order, simply fill in a few values to create a recurring billing agreement.
This agreement flows to ConnectBooster and can be setup for AutoPay, with a saved payment method. Once that invoice is generated on the schedule you defined in Dynamics 365, it will be automatically paid and the payment synced to your accounting package.
No more collections or manual entry of payments, saving you time and getting you paid quicker and more efficiently.
Come see us at CRMUG/GPUG Summit in Nashville in booth #768 and find out more about our great solutions for Dynamics 365 and Dynamics GP.
