Enertiv is a smart building technology platform that brings together modern software tools to digitize operations and provide real-time visibility into the performance of critical infrastructure for commercial real estate portfolios. Started as a pure energy management firm in 2011, this New York-based venture has transformed into an all-in-one solution for operations related to maintenance, energy efficiency, capital planning, tenant billing, and indoor environment monitoring.

The challenge

When it comes to owning and maintaining large commercial establishments, one solution never fits all. Sometimes, the owner of the establishment takes charge of the maintenance and monitoring. In other cases, the building owners outsource the maintenance to a third party. As Enertiv launched more and more services to serve all stakeholders involved, its customer base increased. This growth demanded more transparency and connectivity among the apps that make up their tech stack.

We used Armatic for subscription billing. While it integrated well with our accounting platform, the connectivity with our CRM system wasn't what we expected. As a result, data was stuck in silos that kept us from getting actionable insights.

- Comly Wilson, Director of Marketing, Enertiv

The solution

"Zoho was love at first sight as it strongly resonated with our core belief of offering a holistic solution rather than point-product application for different areas of business," Wilson said. They began their Zoho journey with Zoho CRM, and the harmony it brought to their sales processes gave them the confidence to try Zoho Subscriptions and Books for subscription billing and accounting, respectively. Once they integrated the apps and discovered how closely knit they are, Wilson's team looked no further.

From a subscription billing standpoint, Enertiv's product portfolio is diverse. The subscription amount for each customer varies depending on the products they choose, and the hardware and software that it encompasses. Zoho Subscriptions' flexible billing engine empowers Wilson's team to create a multitude of products, plans, and add-ons at different billing frequencies including monthly, quarterly, and yearly so they can mix, match, and offer customers the packages they want.

Enertiv's clients use a range of payment methods from checks to bank transfers, but they all work with Zoho Subscriptions. Once a payment is recorded in Zoho Subscriptions, it is available in Zoho Books' reports with absolutely no manual work, since both apps run on a common platform. The payment and subscription details get synced with Zoho CRM too, keeping the sales team in the loop.

The benefits

According to Wilson, eliminating departmental silos was the biggest benefit of moving over to Zoho Subscriptions.

Before, the details of our customer subscriptions were limited to the accounting team and there was very little transparency to the other departments. Zoho Subscriptions completely changed that for us. The contextual information flow helps us see a holistic picture of our processes, which was the missing piece in the puzzle.

Besides billing and payment collection, the Enertiv team loves the platform capabilities of Zoho Subscriptions. They can now automate specialized workflows using powerful custom functions, which are snippets of code that can be triggered by an event to perform specific actions. "We use custom functions to automate several tasks that are unique to our business workflows and find them very flexible. A simple function that fetches a specific piece of information from our database and adds it to our invoice description saves us around 10 hours of manual data entry a month, and boosts our team's overall productivity," Wilson said.

Zoho Subscriptions' in-depth integrations with front-office and back-office apps means that Enertiv's cross-functional teams can use contextual data to work together more closely than ever.