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Nitrobox started spring 2023 with two major feature releases and a significant feature update. Also, since our last product update, we opened a new office in Munich and brought two key leaders on board in services and sales (read press release). 2023 is slotted to be another growth year for us as we grow in all directions to bring our clients continued value and new monetization and billing features.Â
Table of Contents
Product Update Highlights
Self-Billing
Manage compensation plans and create self-billing documents of services rendered by suppliers, saving time and effort for companies with multiple partners.
Allowances
Use enhanced Allowances to add discounts or vouchers, give goodwill credits to customers, and remove or update these allowances as needed.
Revenue Recognition
Access Rev Rec configutations in the Webportal, allowing automatic deferral and recognition bookings for upcoming periods if a service is being provided over multiple booking periods, ensuring legal compliance
Nitrobox Spring 2023 Product Update
Expanding the scope of crediting features towards customers or partners and expanding revenue recognition configurations
Cool new features
Revenue Recognition Configuration Update
Our Revenue recognition feature is now fully configurable via the Webportal. To use it, simply add a “Deferral Account” to the revenue account. If a booking entry with a service period spanning at least 2 months is created for this revenue account, then the booking is deferred and recognition bookings are automatically created for the upcoming periods.
Benefit from:
- Complying with the regulations quickly and easily for ASC 606 and IFRS 15
- Showing revenue accurately in the subledger which can be configured directly in the Webportal
- A good overview of the services still owed to a customer
Allowances Feature Release
As an additional tool to credit customers, we released allowances on an option level. With this feature, users can add credit allowances such as discounts or vouchers to the upcoming billing of an option. For example, award a loyal customer with a discount and give them 50% off their next month’s subscription.Â
This feature is designed to allow users to easily issue goodwill credits to customers and improve customer satisfaction strategies. In addition, users can now forego issuing credit notes in many cases and instead offer a credit against upcoming subscription invoices.
By the way: the created option allowances can be removed or updated, as long as they have not been billed yet.
Learn more about the allowances in the Nitrobox documentation.
Self-Billing Feature Release
The Self-billing feature is now fully live! This smart feature extends the scope of debit billing by credit billing operations. This enables Nitrobox users to manage and bill customer-specific partner compensation strategies and create self-billing invoices with just a few clicks.
Users can quickly and easily create credit subscriptions. The resulting self-billing items will then be billed and invoiced automatically on corresponding self-billing invoices.Â
Example credit billing: Partner Company A refers a new customer and receives a referral commission from the company in the form of a self-billing invoice.Â
Example for debit and credit billing: A charging company bills its customers for each kilowatt hour consumed (invoice/debit) and credits them with a fixed finder’s fee for each new charging customer they bring onto their platform (self-billing invoice/credit).
Overall, this feature is very useful for companies with partners that deliver services and products to them such as marketplaces. It enables companies to handle invoicing themselves, the standardization of documents and thereby automatically deal with the payable subledger instead of having to manually handle many hundreds or even thousands of different incoming documents, saving time and money.Â
Learn more about the self-billing feature in the Nitrobox documentation.
Feature & Quality of Life Updates
Options Feature Improvements
Option Properties: Options can now have their own properties (additional data fields) allowing users not only to add additional data and granularity for their specific use case but to also map customer-specific information into their options. Example: The above image shows a property signifying that this AC charging subscription is associated with a marketing campaign, and that the campaign is an April 2023 TV ad.Â
Net/Gross Value Configuration for Options: The second update to the options function involves the selection of the price type. Users can now select whether they want to work with gross or net prices when creating new options. Previously, this was only possible with net values.
Notification (Webhooks) Configuration & Retriggering Update
In the fall 2022 product update, we launched a new UI and feature for configuring and retriggering notifications (webhooks between systems) directly in the Webportal. We expanded this feature in spring 2023 to include extended details, status, attempts, and manual retriggering.Â
Previously, our notifications system maintained a “log” of all attempts made to send data to the recipient system. This approach caused some issues on the client-side, as in the event of a failed delivery attempt, multiple entries (due to retries) were generated for a single item, causing the log to become congested.
However, we have now implemented a new approach, whereby all attempts for a specific item are consolidated into a single entry with a corresponding detailed page that displays all relevant information. This update has streamlined the log, making it easier to locate specific notifications and view their associated information in one place.
Furthermore, our system now offers a “retry all failed notifications” feature, eliminating the need for manual triggering of failed notifications via the web portal.
This update has resulted in significant structural improvements, as failed messages no longer linger in the messaging system, reducing the amount of time required for error monitoring.
Learn more about notifications in the Nitrobox documentation.
Reporting access through the Nitrobox Webportal
Users can now also access the reporting function through the Nitrobox Webportal and retrieve reports – from sub-ledger financial reports to business intelligence reports and analyses. It is also now possible to configure existing standardized or custom reports. If you would like to access this feature, please contact Nitrobox Support for access.
Translation Functionality Increase
Translation functionality has been enabled in the default PDF template for documents, allowing users to customize their PDF documents to a greater extent.
Product Types Update
Additional product types have been added to differentiate between buying and renting. This allows users to assign different tax rules, use different revenue accounts or display it differently on their document PDFs.
Further Quality of Life Improvements
The quality of life updates in this release focused distinctly on user interface improvements in the Nitrobox Webportal. Learn more about the most important changes:Â
- Webportal error notifications are now significantly more detailed. This increase in information helps users to spot and react to integration problems (and other errors) quickly.
- Buttons have been shifted around to more convenient, sensible locations: The "Add order" button moved from the top right of the customer details view to the orders tab in the same view. The "Add usage" button moved from the top right of the contract details view to the usages tab in the same view.
- The first version view of the OPOS information has been removed and replaced by the OPOS case feature. This change provides a more detailed overview of the open positions of the respective transactions.
- During order creation, users can now delete items immediately without having to start the order creation process from the beginning.
- Users can now view the operating sites used in contracts and orders.
- Tax Rules can now be filtered by country.
- The payment details view has been redesigned to help users find information they are looking for more quickly.
We have many further feature releases and updates planned for 2023, so be sure to follow us as we roll them out.Â