You have reached the stage in the maturity of the business where you have a solid customer base. Your revenue is now less volatile as an increasing percentage is based on support-revenue arrangements. Following current trends in the industry, you are looking at, or already offering, hosted cloud-based solutions with no up-front license fees but more long-term revenue stability. Things should be getting easier.
Some of your customers have been on board for years, you’ve extended their agreements many times and over the period, no doubt added multiple configuration and customisations. To be honest, the contracts are a bit of a mess. Staff turnover in your small Finance team means that historic institutional knowledge is a bit thin on the ground. You’ve got paper files of course, somewhere, but how much should you bill this time, and can that customer really cancel support on that feature with no notice? You want this sorted out, you want to know how much money is coming in each month for cash-flow forecasting and you want to make sure that you can defend the invoicing when the customer challenges it. To add to your problems, after years of low inflation, we’re now hitting over 5%, that’s real money, but how much can you get back through increased support charges? Time to pull the original contract and check. Well, all 200 of them actually, and build a spreadsheet!
Software to run companies is available for every type of business and should be able to deal with this level of complexity easily. Except, until now, no-one had written an application specifically targeted to running software companies. Talk about cobbler’s children’s shoes! Harmony has been developed to fill that niche. Its deep functional alignment with the needs of software and services businesses means it can attack this problem without the need for customisation or an expensive implementation project. You can start loading these contracts on day one and once you have them modelled, that problem will never re-occur and you never need to worry again about billing the right amount, on time - leaving you to focus on building the business.
