Overview of Zuora Finance | Zuora | Developer Documentation

Zuora Finance bridges the gap between complex recurring transactions in the subscription economy and traditional accounting, offering solutions to unique financial challenges.

Zuora is built to process complex recurring transactions and designed to generate vital forward-looking subscription metrics. The general ledger on the other hand is built to process one-time transactions and designed to generate traditional income statements and balance sheets. Zuora Finance enables you to connect the complex world of recurring transactions in the subscription economy with the traditional world of accounting and finance.

Unique set of challenges

A recurring revenue business model poses a unique set of challenges for finance professionals:


1	Your general ledger struggles with subscription pricing	Subscription pricing is complex. You are no longer dealing with fixed, one time item prices. Your business wants to roll out free trials and time based promotions, they want to introduce pricing plans that include charges with varying billing frequencies, they want to create usage and overage based pricing plans and more.
2	Your accounting close process is messy	Subscription businesses have a higher volume of transactions per order. A single order leads to multiple bills which result in even more payments. This creates complexity during the accounting close process. .
3	Your revenue recognition is complex	Your subscription pricing models result in complex revenue recognition processes which without automation lead to countless hours of manual processes and audit risk.
4	Your business runs on a new set of metrics	You are increasingly measuring the health of your business using both traditional financial metrics alongside subscription operational metrics such as MRR, TCV, churn and renewal rates.

Zuora Finance is designed to let you use Zuora to address these challenges and stay closely aligned with your general ledger.

Zuora Finance complements your general ledger

Zuora Finance includes a rich set of capabilities designed to let Zuora complement your general ledger and ensure that transactions between the two systems are tightly aligned:


z-finance-accountingPeriods-03.png Accounting Periods: Create accounting periods in Zuora to match the financial periods your business uses to track and measure the health of your business.	z-finance-chartOfAccounts-10.png Chart of Accounts: Keep Zuora and your general ledger closely aligned by using our simple, intuitive user interface or our APIs to create a chart of accounts structure in Zuora that matches your general ledger
z-finance-trialbalance-01.png Trial Balance: Run a trial balance and have your Billing, Cash and Revenue data summarized at any time. See pending transactions for the period so that nothing slips through the cracks.	z-finance-ARAging-09.png Accounts Receivable Aging Reports: View your accounts receivable aging reports as of the close of any accounting period.
z-finance-revenueRecognition-04.png Revenue Recognition: Use Zuora Finance to automate and streamline the process of recognizing revenue and get real time visibility into earned and deferred revenue schedules for billed items.	z-finance-accountingLockdown-08.png Accounting Lockdown: Lock and close accounting periods to ensure no more changes occur to transactions in closed accounting periods.
z-finance-auditControls-06.png Audit Controls: Zuora Finance comes with two pre-built roles, and you can combine any combination of permissions into a customized role. this ensures that only users with the right permissions have access to your sensitive financial data.

Integration with your general ledger

Zuora Finance is designed to help Zuora integrate with your general ledger in one of two ways:


z-finance-summaryJournalEntries-07.png Summary Integration With Journal Entries: Accelerate your month end close process by easily viewing and extracting summary journal entries from Zuora that can be entered into your general ledger.	z-finance-detailIntegration-05.png Detail Integration With Connectors and Extracts: Leverage our pre-built connectors and powerful data export.