Flatline

One aspect of my job as revenue operations manager at Mailtrust is managing our custom built billing system. Although I was not with the company when version one was built, I now oversee every piece of it. It's so amazing to me to see the transformation over the years, especially the few years I have managed the product.

I can go on for hours about the processes that were in place to get an invoice created for our customers. To sum it up in one word - manual. Unfortunately, manual processes are not scalable without increases in cost. In an effort to scale our billing system, we had to revamp a lot of our code to automate processes. The best part - the number of billing team members required in the first version was about 2 employees. Eight years and several versions later we still only need 2. Can you think of any other department that can sustain that headcount with assumed normal company growth?? I can't.

To highlight my most recent improvement to the billing system I was invited to blog about my cancellation project - Flatline, on the Mailtrust company blog. This project has been the most exciting release (recently) for me because of how much more we are cutting out the manual process. I will admit, writing the functional specifications for the project was challenging. I had to debate processes, steps that the customer would have to do, calculations, interface, logging, reporting, etc. Eventually, things fell into place and the technical specs were created. Add a little more debating, tweaking and debugging and finally, there you have it. Something that started out as an inconvenience is now automated.

Now that this project has been released, it's time to go back to the drawing board for the next biggest thing for our billing system. Hmmmm....where to start???