Outsource billing with Billtrust and learn why hundreds of other companies are saving time and money through billing process improvement, migration of customers to e-billing and enabling other aspects of their billing strategy.

Billing Services Industry Terms

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	ACH The abbreviation for Automated Clearing House, which is an electronic network for financial transactions in the United States that is networked with others to exchange (clear and settle) electronic debit/credit transactions (i.e. no physical checks). ACH is an important part of allowing your customers to securely make online payments from their banks. Businesses are increasingly using ACH to collect from customers online, rather than accepting credit or debit cards. The process consists of: the customer authorizing the vendor to debit their account (usually resulting from a sign-up for an automatic debit of their account); followed by the vendor creating an ACH entry and transmitting the entry to the customer's financial institution; followed by the ACH entry being sent to an ACH operator (most often the Federal Reserve); concluded by the transaction being sent on to the vendor's financial institution for the vendor's account to be credited accordingly. Billtrust's CompleteBilling solution supports this entire process.
	Bill Archive and Retrieval Involves storing an electronic version of bills for access at a later date. Billtrust will store an image of all bills for customers, most of whom opt to store their bills for a two-year period. The Billtrust Billing Archive and Retrieval system is a great tool to help you provide superior service to your customers as it enables your call center personnel to securely view, print, fax, and email any bill in response to a customer inquiry.
	Bill Acquisition Refers to the method by which bills are obtained by a Billing Service Provider, such as Billtrust. Billtrust receives billing feeds from our clients in a variety of different formats including CSV, Print File and XML.
	Bill Batching Involves ensuring that different bills with the same billing address get placed in the same envelope to save postage and envelope costs. Billtrust's CompleteBilling solution ensures that bill batching opportunities are leveraged for maximum savings.
	Bill Design and Generation Refers to the layout and format of the bills sent to customers and the related generation of these bills. Billtrust designs a new billing format for our customers that improves the image of their company and makes it easier for their customers to understand their bill. We have developed a form modeling and generation language that allows us to express the design of a bill in a simple CSV format.
	Bill Marketing Bill Marketing is part of a direct marketing strategy called "Transpromo", which combines personalized marketing messages with must-read statements, invoices, receipts and other customer-facing documents. The bill is a touch point that is reviewed by customers on a daily basis. Dynamic and personalized marketing messages can be imprinted on your bills that will allow you to drive new revenues with your customers by notifying them of additional products and services, special discounts and promotions, etc. Business-to-consumer companies have been taking advantage of this marketing opportunity for years. Billtrust has developed a sophisticated interface that make it easy for our customers to place personalized messages onto a bill.
	Billing BPO Business Process Outsourcing for the Billing function involves outsourcing the entire process of billing to an outsourced billing provider such as Billtrust. For paper billing, the entire process of bill printing, folding, envelope stuffing and bill faxing or bill mailing is included; along with access to necessary on-line systems to view images of the bills which have been sent. For electronic billing, the entire process of electronically transmitting the bills to the customer, along with potential electronic payment receipt and settlement can be part of the process. Billtrust is a specialist in the business process of billing, and we support a broad range of alternative scenarios to meet every customer need.
	Billing Optimization Refers to optimizing the billing process. Billing process optimization involves maximizing billing accuracy and minimizing the time and cost associated with all steps in the billing process: from the point at which the bill is generated through to the point where payment is received from the customer. Billtrust has deep subject-matter expertise in billing process optimization, including effective bill design which is an important part of the process, having helped hundreds of companies to optimize their billing to save our clients and their customers time and money.
	Billing Service Provider Refers to an organization that provides services for part or all of a company's billing process. Businesses which provide support for only the automated portion of the billing process are sometimes referred to as a Billing ASP or Billing Application Service Provider. Other companies focus exclusively on providing paper billing services. Billtrust, however, provides complete Billing Solutions to address all aspects of a company's billing needs.
	Billing Solution A complete billing solution should address all variations of how bills should be sent to customers and payment processed back from customers. This includes print billing, fax billing, email billing, on-line billing, automated billing inquiry and automated payment processing. The Billtrust CompleteBilling solution thoroughly addresses all of these aspects.
	Billing Strategy It is important for any business sending a large number of bills on a recurring basis to its customers to take a strategic approach to billing - meaning that they should consider how the billing process interfaces with other internal processes and their customer's processes (or activities if it is a consumer), and define how their internal business objectives will be met regarding improving marketing effectiveness, improving customer service, improving efficiency through electronic initiatives, cutting costs, etc. Most often, when companies take a hard look at their billing function within the context of their overall strategic objectives, they conclude that using a billing specialist like Billtrust delivers the best return on investment.
	Bullpenning Allows for a minimum dollar threshold to be set before a bill will be sent resulting in savings on postage and material. If you are sending multiple bills to your customers on a daily or weekly basis, Bullpenning can result in significant savings. Billtrust invented this technology and the Billtrust CompleteBilling solution provides complete support for the Bullpenning process.
	CASS The Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS) is a certification program offered by the United States Postal Service for all companies providing mailing services, such as Billtrust, who would like the USPS to evaluate the quality of their address-matching software and improve the accuracy of their ZIP+4, carrier route, and five-digit coding accuracy. Billtrust utilizes CASS certified software which also allows us to obtain bulk mail discouts on your behalf from the USPS.
	e-Adoption Implementation of billing best practices to drive adoption of electronic billing to help you and your customers save time and money. Effective e-Adoption programs involve plans that target specific customers along with clear communication programs, point people for assisting the customer and reporting mechanisms for tracking e-Adoption progress. Billtrust B2B e-Adoption and B2C e-Adoption programs are leading edge, and leverage our deep experience in this area.
	e-Billing Short for Electronic Billing (or Electronic Invoicing), e-Billing (or e-Invoicing) involves the electronic transmission of bills to customers along with the optional on-line customer review of bills, payment and settlement into the vendor's account. Billtrust's CompleteBilling solution supports all aspects of e-Billing.
	E-mail Billing Involves the transmission of all of a customer's invoices via e-mail. With the Billtrust E-mail Billing service, each day we email your customer all of their invoices in a single PDF file. The invoice is an exact replica of the paper invoice. Included with the email is our EasyImport feature that allows your customers to import their invoice data directly into accounting packages like QuickBooksT.
	EBPP Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment or EBPP refers to a fully automated business-to-consumer billing and payment process. With the Billtrust EBPP solution, consumers can optionally receive automated notification via e-mail of the existence their bill and they can sign on to our hosted online solution, which is desiged to have the look and feel of your company. We offer both a credit card and an ACH payment option for your customers to choose from. Payment goes directly to your financial institution of choice.
	EIPP Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment or EIPP refers to the fully automated business-to-business customer billing and payment process. With the Billtrust EIPP Invoice Gateway solution, customers can receive their invoices electronically and sign on to a website customized with your look and feel to do everything they need to with regard to their invoices - they can: view the invoice; sort invoices by key criteria such as date, amount, location, PO#, etc.; search for invoices based on invoice or PO#; download the invoice data into their accounting package (e.g. QuickBooksT); print the invoices; and of course, pay them.
	Fax Billing Refers to the fax transmission of invoices to your customers. Billtrust Billtrust Fax Billing Solutions include advanced automatic retry and recovery logic which ensures faxes will get through in a completed manner, and will include all invoices to be faxed that day for the customer.
	Online Billing Also called EBPP (Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment), On-line Billing typically refers to business-to-consumer scenarios where bills are transmitted via e-mail and/or made available via a hosted website for review and potential payment by the consumer.
	Outsourced Billing Also referred to as Outsourced Invoicing, Billing Outsourcing and Invoice Outsourcing; this term is used to describe the state of a company's billing operations being performed by a third-party company such as Billtrust.
	Paper Billing Refers to all of the steps involved with designing the bill, generating and printing the bill, sorting, stuffing envelopes, sealing envelopes and mailing the bill via the USPS. Billtrust's Paper Billing Services support the entire process. We maximize postage discounts due to high volume mailing, address certification and mail presort. We utilize state-of-the-art, highly automated printing, inserting and mailing equipment. We get the best pricing on materials due to high volume purchases of paper, envelopes and ink. We enable batching of your bills to make sure all bills going to the same address are put into one envelope and Bullpenning of low dollar invoices to reduce your costs by only sending bills to your customers when a minimum dollar threshold is met. Our customer signature capture feature ensures confidence that your customers received the product they are paying for. And we can offer a 100% bill delivery guarantee thanks to our advanced dual bar coding and scanner technology. Finally, we are experts in bill design . and research shows that a well-designed bill reduces customer service inquiries, drives greater customer satisfaction and faster payment.
	Reduce Days Sales Outstanding Days Sales Outstanding expresses the average time, in days, it takes your company to convert its accounts receivables into cash. DSO is important as a financial indicator to the extent that it shows the age, in terms of days, of an organization's accounts receivable and the average time it takes to turn those receivables into cash. Optimizing the billing process can reduce DSO by cutting the time it takes to get bills to customers, and cutting the time it takes to elicit payment from customers.
	Signature Capture Refers to functionality where an image of the signature of the person who signed for receipt of a customer's invoiced items is made available as part of an on-line system as supporting documentation for related invoices.
	Statement Billing Refers to the regular, recurring generation of bills or invoices to be sent to customers.
	Uncertified Addresses Refer to addresses which cannot be verified using CASS certified software. This software is used to obtain barcodes from the USPS for addresses in order to speed USPS processing and obtain bulk mail discounts. Addresses typically fail verification and are thus uncertified for a variety of reasons including: incorrect secondary lines on the address; an incorrect order of the information in the address, etc. The correct order for address information is: First Line: Business Name; Second Line: Delivery Address (if possible put Secondary Information on this line, if not put on next line); Third Line: City, State Zip Code). If addresses fail verification, then a barcode cannot be retrieved from the CASS database and additional postage is required and the mail takes longer to arrive at its destination.
	USPS Intelligent Mail Barcode Refers to the barcode retrieved by the CASS certified software to enable the USPS to scan the address enabling faster processing; reduced postage requirements; and advanced tracking or mail. Billtrust's CompleteBilling solution includes advanced tracking of intelligent mail allowing our clients to view where, exactly, their invoices are at various points in the USPS delivery process.