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CASE STUDY

Automating Revenue to Invoice Billing for a Usage-Based Services Company

A usage-based services company was manually reconciling data from multiple revenue streams every month before a single invoice could go out. Here’s how we built an automated billing pipeline in NetSuite that turned a multi-day manual process into a scheduled, repeatable flow.

Industry

Entertainment & Media

Engagement

,

Company Size

Mid-market
4 Weeks

Requirements

Gathering

12 Weeks

Total Go-Live

✓

OneWorld

✓

Custom Development

Billing automation·Custom PDF Templates·Invoice Automation·Revenue Recognition

The Problem

The client generates revenue from multiple usage-based service lines, including equipment usage and subscription-based offerings. Usage data comes in from multiple sources, in different formats, on different schedules. Some daily, some weekly, and none of it lines up cleanly with a monthly billing cycle.

Every month, the finance team had to manually reconcile that usage data before they could even start building invoices. Pricing formulas vary by customer agreement, so calculating charges wasn’t just a matter of adding up usage. Taxes and credits had to be layered in by hand too. There was no system tracking revenue earned versus revenue actually billed, so nothing was repeatable from month to month. Each cycle started from scratch.
  • Daily and weekly usage data from multiple sources with no common format
  • Customer-specific pricing formulas complicating charge calculations
  • Manual tax and credit calculations before invoices could be built
  • No repeatable process. Every cycle reconciled from scratch
  • No system of record for revenue earned versus revenue billed
  • Customers needed clear documentation of what they were being charged for

    • The Solution

    We built a multi-stage billing pipeline in NetSuite using custom staging records and Map/Reduce scripts to move data through daily, weekly, and monthly consolidation. Each stage applies the customer’s agreement rules, calculates tax, and pulls in any applicable credits. By the time a record hits the monthly stage it’s a finished, calculated balance, not raw usage data anymore.
    br> From there, the monthly balance gets converted into a standard NetSuite Invoice or Credit Memo automatically, with the script picking the right transaction type based on whether the balance is positive or negative. We also built out custom PDF templates (Advanced PDF/FreeMarker) so each invoice includes a real breakdown of the charges, not just a total.
  • Map/Reduce scripts handling daily import and weekly/monthly consolidation
  • Agreement-specific billing rules applied automatically at each stage
  • Automated tax and credit calculations built into the pipeline
  • Automatic Invoice/Credit Memo generation based on balance sign
  • Custom FreeMarker PDF templates showing itemized charge detail

    • The Results

    Before this, running a round of invoices was entirely manual. Even after the finance team finished reconciling usage data by hand, it was still another 24+ hours before invoices could go out. That delay wasn’t a system bottleneck. It was just how long manual data handling took.

    Now the whole thing runs on a schedule inside NetSuite: daily import, weekly rollup, monthly invoice generation, with no one manually exporting from one system and cross-checking against another. The finance team isn’t spending their time assembling data anymore. They’re reviewing what the system already calculated, which is a faster and more accurate way to close out billing each month.
  • Eliminated manual, multi-system reconciliation before invoicing
  • Cut 24+ hours of manual data handling down to a scheduled automated pipeline
  • No more manual cross-checking between the external usage system and NetSuite
  • Finance team shifted from data assembly to reviewing and validating output
  • Repeatable process that handles multiple agreement types without rework each cycle

    • Planning Something Similiar?

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    Understand Business Complexity

    Our combined experiences in diverse industries provide us with unique insights allowing our NetSuite Consultants to provide solutions to multifaceted problems.It has been our experience that often times people look for the easiest solution instead of facing the problems head-on. This creates manual workaround and loss of man hours that contribute to increased labor costs to resolve systematic problems.

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