Month end with partners
You have your own customers, and you have a handful of smaller dealers and IT companies who sell your hosted voice and connectivity under their name or yours. One partner buys at wholesale and bills their own customers. Another gets a share of the monthly revenue on customers they introduced. A third gets a one-off payment per new seat plus a small ongoing share. Two of them also resell mobile through you.
After the bill run, someone takes the billing export, filters it by a partner field that is filled in most of the time, applies each partner's terms in a spreadsheet, and produces statements. It takes days. Partners query their statements because a customer is missing, or a new seat was not counted, or a credit note was deducted from their share when they think it should not be.
Everyone is doing their best. But the agreements live in PDFs, the customer-to-partner link lives in a free text field, and the maths lives in someone's head.
Where partner billing goes wrong
- The link between a customer and its partner is not recorded consistently, especially for customers added by your own staff on a partner's behalf.
- Each partner's agreement has its own rules, and some partners have more than one agreement over time.
- Credits, one-off charges and call usage are treated differently under different deals, and the rules are not written down in one place.
- Customers that move between partners, or come back direct, confuse the history.
- Partners cannot see the detail behind their statement, so they query anything that looks off.
What the manual process costs
| Problem | Effect |
|---|---|
| Customer not tagged to partner | Partner underpaid, relationship strained |
| Wrong rule applied | Overpayment you rarely recover |
| Statement late | Partners chase, finance distracted |
| No detail behind totals | Every statement is questioned |
| Wholesale partners billed late | Your cash sits with them longer |
Partners are a channel you want to grow. A statement that arrives late and needs correcting is a reason for a good partner to try someone else.
Wholesale partners add a cash problem on top. If their invoice goes out a week after your bill run, you have paid your suppliers for their customers' lines and seats long before they pay you, and the delay grows every time a statement has to be corrected and reissued.
Partner billing we build on top of your bill run
- Every customer and service is tagged to a partner (or to 'direct') in your billing platform or CRM, with a start date. Untagged customers are listed for review before each run.
- Each partner agreement is recorded as rules, not prose: wholesale price list, revenue share percentages by product type, one-off payments per new service, and how credits and usage are treated. Agreements have effective dates, so changes apply from the right month.
- After your normal bill run, the system reads the billed lines and applies each partner's rules to produce their figures.
- Wholesale partners get an invoice from your accounts package, such as Xero, and commission partners get a statement and a self-bill or a request for their invoice, depending on how you pay them.
- Each partner can see the detail behind their total, line by line, in a simple portal or a spreadsheet attachment.
- Queries are logged against the line in question, so fixes are made at the source and apply next month too.
We do not change how you bill your end customers. Partner billing runs after your bill run, using its results.
How month end changes
Partner statements come out shortly after the bill run, with detail behind every number. Queries drop because partners can see how their figures were worked out. Finance deals with the few genuine questions rather than rebuilding every statement.
Directors can finally see revenue and margin by channel: direct customers against each partner, which is the information you need when deciding which partners to invest in.
New partners are quicker to set up too. Their agreement is entered as rules on day one, their customers are tagged as they are ordered, and their first statement is right without anyone learning a new spreadsheet.
Is partner billing a monthly headache?
- Partner statements are built in a spreadsheet after each bill run.
- Partner agreements live only in PDFs or email.
- Partners regularly query their statements.
- Not every customer is reliably linked to its partner.
- You cannot easily see margin by partner.