General Purpose Billing & Management

As a software company we use the Emerald Suite internally to manage virtually all aspects of our organization including billing, contract renewal, payment processing, support/ticket management, sales management, license management, reseller lead management and revenue reporting. Over the last three years Emerald has helped us to streamline our own internal processes moving from the use of a half-dozen off the shelf or custom built software products to a single unified Emerald system.

Billing Features

• Point-of-Sale (POS) functionality allows one time invoices to be quickly generated and presented for payment.
• Estimates provide the ability to issue quotes for new products and services while giving operators the choice to make changes to existing estimates and finally convert estimates to invoices for payment as pending sales are finalized.
• Automated recurring billing enables renewal-based services such as subscriptions, contracts and long term property or equipment rental. Central to recurring billing is automated rule based proration for each type of service. Recurring services may be upgraded or downgraded or cancelled at any time with the system automatically issuing credits or debits properly accounting for any change in service.
• Introductory offers for recurring services provide for initial pricing for new services automatically switching to standard pricing after a predefined amount of time.
• Flexible tax structures and tax reporting supporting taxes throughout many areas of the world. Taxes are configurable such that they apply conditionally based on the state, country or region the customer is located. Tax-on-Tax (piggyback) schemes such as GST/VAT are supported allowing any number of taxes to be grouped and assessed in the correct order. Tax ceilings, floors and cumulative options enable complex tax rules such as the Texas Internet tax. Configurable exemptions allow the application of certain taxes to be withheld on a per customer and per charge basis. Emeralds tax reporting provides historically accurate summaries of taxes invoiced and paid.
• Sales person commission tracking and reporting allows percentage based and static point commission tracking of monies invoiced and paid.
• Credit Card and EFT batch system enables processing of credit card payments or issue of credit refunds in real-time. Customers may submit payments directly through the Emerald customer center or billed automatically each billing period. Multiple transaction processors are supported based on any combination of organization/billing group and card type. Failed transaction management and automated customer notifications based on common conditions such as approaching card expiration date enable streamlined management of electronic transactions.
• Account Statements provides customers with a monthly view of the status of their account showing new payments, charges and account aging.
• Duplicate payment protection warnings help prevent against accidental double billing of customers.
• Late fees and send method charges.
• Billing preview simulates the billing process allowing operators to check for errors before proceeding to bill customers.
• Discount structures on per account and pay period basis.
• Quick pay feature with barcode scan enables efficient bulk recording of payments received
• Multi-Organization support allows separation of all account related reporting, security, currency and available options at the organization level effectively allowing a single instance of Emerald to provide billing services for a number of organizations.

Platform Features

• Web based multi-user application designed to support hundreds of thousands of customer accounts with hundreds of concurrent operator sessions. Operators need only a web browser to access the Emerald system.
• Customer account center optionally provides customers direct access to their accounts where they can review their account balance, billing history, make credit card payments and request assistance online.
• Optimized for low bandwidth links such as telephone modems and cellular radios allowing remote access to Emerald from a wide range of environments.
• Emerald security enables you to secure the Emerald environment using a number of complimentary approaches including fine grained access controls, ip access controls, transport encryption (SSL/TLS), AES encrypted storage of sensitive customer data, detailed access logging and operator amount limits on payment transactions.
• Multiple languages are supported and automatically detected for each operator based on their browser's language settings. Languages translations for any language can be added or updated using the Emerald language editor included with Emerald.
• Time saving features such as quick pay, automated account lookup of incoming calls, hot key access to navigational menu items and auto-filling of data such as state/city based on postal code are available throughout Emerald.
• Customizable and Extensible - The Emerald Suite provides several avenues to customize or add-on to the system. Themes provide access to the layout of the Emerald UI allowing anything from the display of a company logo to completely altering the systems look and feel based on industry standard CSS technology. Custom data fields throughout the Emerald suite allow seamless addition of new input fields or selection lists to each customer account to record, display and search custom data. Emerald supports two different reporting technologies - our ews report templates and crystal reports (requires crystal reports) allowing either to be used to design new reports or modify existing ones. The menu navigation system used throughout Emerald is configurable. An included UI enables administrators to add new items to the menu system for linking to custom add-ons or external applications. For those wishing to use the Emerald platform to add custom features or manage external data -- database schema documentation, technical documentation on the ews template language and our database metadata based code generator are also available.
• Reliable - Backup databases allows continued access in the event of a database server failure. All billing related operations are fully transactional. They either complete successfully or don't occur. Change conflict detection throughout the application ensure conflicting changes occurring at the same time by different operators are detected and dealt with.

Customer Support / CRM features

• One of Emeralds core functions is effective management of customer inquiries and pending work requests. Using Emeralds call center automated telephony account lookup tool incoming callers are automatically identified and their account records opened for review. CSRs can then quickly log notes related to the conversation or assign a support ticket to individuals or departments within the organization for resolution. Emerald uses a load balancing method for assignment of incidents to individuals within a department based on each members current workload with support for department level escalations and time limits/due date email reminders to prevent open requests from "slipping through the cracks". Depending on the type of requests different fields and selectable states appear allowing the CSR to log and collect the information relevant to a specific request. All data logged is later also accessible for CSRs to perform full text searches in order to locate similar situations and their solutions. Please see the Emerald product page for a complete list of features.