Category: Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA/ARM): What’s New, What’s Next, and How to Get Ready

Posted on November 19, 2025 by Danielle Adams - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, Partnership, Salesforce Revenue Cloud

Danielle Adams

An inside look at how enterprises are getting revenue ready for the next generation of Salesforce architecture.

Salesforce’s next-generation revenue platform, Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA), now Agentforce Revenue Management (ARM)—marks a major step forward from Salesforce Revenue Cloud.

RCA (now ARM) is built on a modern, component-based architecture designed to support complex pricing, contracts, and order orchestration across the full quote-to-cash lifecycle.

Unlike traditional Salesforce products that evolve on a fixed release schedule, RCA (ARM) is advancing rapidly with releases every few weeks to meet customer demand. New components and capabilities roll out at a rapid pace, expanding what’s possible for revenue operations teams.

For many organizations, the opportunity is exciting, but also complex. ARM’s flexibility introduces new design considerations for how pricing, quoting, amendments, invoicing , and ERP processes fit together.

What Salesforce Is Building with RCA/ARM

RCA/ARM builds on lessons learned from Salesforce Revenue Cloud. Revenue Cloud was like buying a boxed LEGO set—it came with clear instructions and all the right pieces to build a defined outcome. Done well, you could end up with something impressive, like the Millennium Falcon. But if you tried to build something different, you often had to improvise, and the result could be unstable or overly customized as the product evolved.

RCA changes that model. It’s more like being handed a bucket of LEGO bricks—you can build almost anything, but it requires more planning, design skill, and time to get it right. ARM’s component-based architecture introduces new services for advanced pricing, contracts, and order orchestration, giving teams far more flexibility and scalability, but also more architectural responsibility.

Many organizations see that flexibility as the future, but they also recognize the value of bringing their existing Salesforce CPQ environment back closer to standard. Continuous helps them do exactly that—simplifying the foundation while introducing capabilities legacy Revenue Cloud doesn’t natively handle well, such as ramps, usage-based pricing and rating, credit balance or digital wallet management, and a cleaner, automated handoff to ERP systems like NetSuite.

This approach buys organizations time to evaluate ARM’s growing capabilities while continuing to roll out new functionality today. With Continuous in place, they gain a modernized, maintainable architecture now and a clear path to ARM when the timing makes sense.

What This Means for Salesforce Revenue Cloud Customers

If you’re already using Salesforce Revenue Cloud, you don’t need to start over to modernize. Your current implementation can evolve—supporting new pricing models, consumption scenarios, and ERP integration today while preparing for ARM tomorrow.

We’re working with companies of all sizes that are evaluating whether to adopt RCA (ARM) now or extend their existing Salesforce setup with Continuous. For many, enhancing legacy Revenue Cloud first delivers faster wins and creates a smoother on-ramp for a future migration.

Common goals include:

Introducing advanced pricing logic, ramps, and usage-based models
Managing prepaid credits and drawdowns directly in Salesforce
Automating data flows and journal entries into NetSuite or other ERPs

This approach lets teams innovate without risk—modernizing now while keeping every option open later.

How Continuous Helps

Continuous enables Salesforce customers to modernize their revenue stack—legacy Revenue Cloud (Salesforce CPQ) or RCA/ARM—without the cost or disruption of a rebuild. We extend Salesforce with flexible pricing, rating, and ERP-ready billing logic that works across both current and next-generation architectures.

With Continuous, teams can:

Add modern pricing, usage, and credit models directly within Salesforce
Connect Salesforce quoting and billing to NetSuite or other ERPs
Evaluate RCA/ARM readiness and move on their own timeline

Our team includes the former Head of Product for Salesforce Revenue Cloud, so we understand both systems from the inside. We know how they differ, how Salesforce’s component architecture works, and what it takes to bridge between them.

Planning Your Path Forward

Whether you’re evaluating ARM now or simply planning ahead, the right next step is an RCA/ARM readiness review.

Continuous helps you:

Assess how your current pricing and quoting logic aligns with ARM’s component model
Identify what can be reused, extended, or decoupled

Build a modernization plan that fits your business—not a vendor timeline

The Bottom Line

RCA/ARM is both a huge opportunity and a massive shift in Salesforce’s revenue ecosystem—more flexible, faster-moving, and built for the future. The key is knowing how to harness that innovation without introducing risk.

At Continuous, we fixed quote-to-cash in Salesforce and NetSuite so your business is revenue ready, no matter where you are on your journey. We help companies bring Salesforce CPQ back to standard, add the advanced capabilities needed today, and move confidently toward RCA/ARM when the time is right.Interested in learning more about the Shift to RCA? Check out our recent article: Is Your Business RCA-Ready? Five Questions to Ask Before Making the Leap Or, contact us to schedule a Salesforce RCA/ARM readiness session.

Recap: Revenue Management from Readiness to ROI

Posted on November 10, 2025 by Rachel Bruce - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, Partnership, Salesforce Revenue Cloud

Rachel Bruce

Leaders from Continuous and Atrium explore how data, intelligence, and automation are redefining the future of revenue management.

At the RevOps Roundtable: Revenue Management from Readiness to ROI, industry leaders including John Banks, Founder & CEO of Continuous, joined Stephen Burry and Micah Gerger of Atrium to unpack the evolution of Salesforce Revenue Cloud, the rise of usage-based monetization, and the central role of data in shaping the next generation of revenue operations.

Moderated in an open discussion format, the panel brought together decades of experience in quote-to-cash, CPQ, Billing, and revenue recognition to explore how organizations are re-architecting for agility, visibility, and AI-driven intelligence.

From Legacy Systems to Connected Revenue Lifecycles

The conversation began with a retrospective — tracing the evolution from SteelBrick CPQ to Salesforce’s Revenue Cloud and, now, the emergence of Agentforce Revenue Management (ARM). Each iteration, panelists agreed, represented a step toward connecting the full revenue lifecycle, from quote to billing to ledger. The shift from legacy CPQ systems to intelligent revenue management platforms marks more than a product evolution — it’s a redefinition of how organizations operationalize growth.

The panelists highlighted how architectural flexibility — through open APIs, subledger options, and embedded AI — is allowing companies to modernize without abandoning their core systems. “The architecture lets you choose the point in the process that makes sense for you,” noted Banks. “You don’t have to replace everything at once to start innovating.” Through open integration frameworks, subledger models, and AI-driven insights, enterprises can extend intelligence across existing systems without starting over. This move from static process to adaptive lifecycle signals the next era of revenue management — one defined by connection, continuity, and control.

The Convergence of CRO and CFO: Redefining RevOps

What began years ago as alignment between sales and marketing has now expanded into a full organizational mandate — uniting CROs and CFOs around a shared revenue strategy.

“RevOps isn’t just about driving pipeline anymore,” said Burry. “It’s about connecting how you sell with how you recognize revenue — and building systems that support both in real time.”

Panelists described how the next wave of RevOps maturity will depend on data continuity — bridging operational systems across the entire quote-to-cash journey. The goal isn’t just visibility, but orchestration: the ability to run revenue like an integrated engine rather than a collection of disconnected workflows.

Why Data is the New Equity in RevOps

As the discussion turned to the future, one idea became central: data has become the most valuable asset in revenue management.

“When you capture not just what’s been consumed, but what was expected to be consumed, you unlock a new layer of intelligence,” said Banks. “That delta, between forecast and reality, is where growth and customer trust take shape.”

Panelists emphasized the shift from static reports to real-time, contextualized data, and the opportunity to use it to predict churn, identify upsell moments, and even forecast outcomes.

“Data has integrity and equity,” added Burry. “If you get the integrity right, the data becomes a goldmine.”

For organizations embracing AI, data integrity isn’t optional, it’s the foundation for accuracy, automation, and continuous improvement.

AI, Agents, and the Rise of Experiential Revenue

When asked what comes next, the panel agreed: the future of RevOps will be experiential, conversational, and predictive.

AI-driven agents are enabling teams to shift from reactive forecasting to proactive engagement — not just surfacing insights, but acting on them.

“Imagine a seller or CSM having the same conversation with an AI that knows your customer’s usage trends, billing history, and renewal date — all in context,” said Gerger. “That’s where revenue management becomes intelligence management.”

Banks expanded on how AI and usage data combine to anticipate customer needs and prevent revenue leakage: “When you store estimation data alongside actuals, AI can instantly flag the gap. You can re-engage before a customer churns or before a billing surprise happens.”

From Usage to Outcomes: The Next Frontier of Monetization

As the session closed, the group reflected on a major industry shift: the movement from usage-based pricing to outcome-based monetization.

“Customers used to buy licenses,” Banks said. “Now they’re buying results. They want to pay for the outcomes they achieve, not just the inputs they consume.”

The panel discussed how companies are experimenting with pre-commit and burn-down models — similar to those used by AI and cloud providers — where customers commit to outcomes and pay as those outcomes are delivered.

“If usage tells you what’s happening,” said Burry, “outcomes tell you why it matters.”

It’s a future where every transaction, renewal, and expansion is tied to measurable impact — and where connected data makes those impacts transparent.

The Continuous Advantage

Built natively on Salesforce and NetSuite, Continuous automates the entire quote-to-cash lifecycle — from quoting and pricing to billing, revenue recognition, and usage visibility. Sales can configure any deal type directly in Salesforce, while Finance bills and reconciles automatically in NetSuite.

Continuous delivers what those systems can’t — modern quote-to-cash, out of the box.

Ready to turn your revenue data into your most valuable asset? Discover how Continuous helps companies modernize quote-to-cash for the age of AI, automation, and outcome-based growth. Learn more at www.continuoustech.com or contact us.

Want to see how it works?

Schedule a personalized demo today and see exactly how Continuous transforms your capabilities, enhances data consistency, and delivers immediate value.

Recap: The Signals That Power Smart Selling l Dreamforce 2025

Posted on November 3, 2025 by Rachel Bruce - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, Salesforce Revenue Cloud

Rachel Bruce

Leaders from Continuous, FULLPRESS, and Dynatrace reveal how AI and connected data are reshaping Quote-to-Cash, Monetization and Customer growth.

At Dreamforce 2025, leaders from Continuous, FULLPRESS, and Dynatrace gathered to explore how AI and unified data are reshaping the quote-to-cash journey — powering smarter pricing, faster decisions, and measurable customer value. Moderated by Danielle Adams of Continuous, the discussion unpacked how organizations are moving from static subscription models to flexible, outcome-based monetization and what it takes to operationalize that change inside today’s systems.

Artificial intelligence isn’t just improving workflows and automating tasks, it’s fundamentally changing how we define value. The focus is moving from inputs, like licenses or API calls, to outcomes — the measurable benefits customers achieve, explained Banks.

Instead of “buy X seats,” it’s now “pay for Y results.” Companies are moving toward outcome-based models where pricing reflects real usage and delivered value. AI makes this possible because it allows precise measurement of engagement, case resolutions, or predictive impact — metrics that were hard to quantify before.

And with that comes flexibility — launching AI-powered capabilities as add-ons, usage credits, or pilot programs. It’s changing pricing from static tiers to dynamic, evolving frameworks that adapt as customers adopt.

Keenan Wojnicz (FULLPRESS) agreed. “We used to debate what a fair price was,” he said. “Now, fairness is in the outcome. When you tie usage directly to customer value, pricing becomes objective, not guesswork.”  

Tools like Salesforce Revenue Cloud (now called Salesforce Agentforce Revenue Management) and Continuous’ AI-driven platform make that possible, connecting product telemetry to go-to-market data for a real-time view of performance. The result: smarter pricing, clearer ROI, and stronger customer relationships.

“Now, fairness is in the outcome. When you tie usage directly to customer value, pricing becomes objective, not guesswork.”

Connected Data: The Engine of Modern Monetization

If AI is the brain of smart selling, connected data is its bloodstream. Chitrang Patel (Dynatrace) described how his company unified usage data scattered across systems. “AI doesn’t work without unified data,” he said. “Once we connected everything, we could correlate product usage, training, and outcomes — and act on it.”  

Continuous played a pivotal role, helping Dynatrace move from overnight batch processing to real-time insight. “What took six hours now happens in minutes,” Patel said. “That agility lets us make decisions and serve customers faster.”  

Banks underscored the importance of incremental progress: “Start simple — daily or hourly reporting — then evolve toward real time. Once people see insights, they’ll want more.” Transparency also emerged as a differentiator. Dynatrace now shares consumption data directly with customers — a move Patel said “builds trust and drives proactive engagement.”

“What took six hours now happens in minutes. “That agility lets us make decisions and serve customers faster.”  - Chitrang Patel, Dynatrace

New Metrics for a Usage-Driven World

Traditional KPIs like ARR and MRR no longer tell the whole story. “Boards want to know how much growth comes through usage,” said Wojnicz. “Cohort analysis and on-demand revenue tracking paint a clearer picture than static bookings.”  

Patel added, “Overage revenue — customers exceeding their commitments — has become a key indicator of adoption.” Banks (Continuous) explained that uniting financial and product data changes the game: “When usage, billing, and revenue recognition live in one system, finance can move from defense to offense.”  

‘Traditional metrics like ARR and MRR don’t tell the whole story anymore. Companies are introducing new KPIs—on-demand revenue, overage ratios, consumption cohorts—that actually track how value is realized, not just sold.”

Flexibility and the Future of Quote-to-Consumption

As the session closed, Adams asked each panelist for one piece of advice for leaders navigating this shift.  

“Define your North Star AI strategy,” said Wojnicz. “Know what data you’ll need and make sure your systems can deliver it.”  

“Focus on customer experience,” said Patel. “Be transparent with usage and help customers realize value — that’s how you build trust.”  

And Banks reminded attendees to “Design for flexibility. Pricing will change; your systems must evolve with it. Those who adapt fastest will lead.”  

The conversation ended with a shared vision of the future as quote-to-consumption driven, with continuous data flow as the fuel for smart selling. “The entire customer lifecycle—selling, onboarding, renewal—is blending into one continuous loop of insight and action that will drive customer value and growth together.” said Banks   “And that loop only works if data is unified. When telemetry, contracts, and finance data all live together, AI can finally operate on the full picture.” added Wojnicz.

As Adams summed up: “When data is unified and AI is embedded across the lifecycle, every day becomes a selling day.” What happens in Salesforce flows cleanly into NetSuite, without surprises.

“When data is unified and AI is embedded across the lifecycle, every day becomes a selling day.” – Danielle Adams, Continuous

The Continuous Advantage

Salesforce and NetSuite weren’t built to handle complex quote-to-cash — especially when usage, credits, or hybrid deals enter the mix. The result: manual workarounds, disconnected tools, and teams buried in spreadsheets.  Continuous fixes that.  

Built natively on Salesforce and NetSuite, Continuous automates the entire quote-to-cash lifecycle — from quoting and pricing to billing, revenue recognition, and usage visibility. Sales can configure any deal type directly in Salesforce, while finance bills and reconciles automatically in NetSuite.  

By embedding automation and usage intelligence inside the systems teams already use, Continuous eliminates integration friction, speeds time to revenue, and gives companies a single, trusted view of every customer.  Continuous delivers what those systems can’t — modern quote-to-cash, out of the box.

Want to see how it works?

Schedule a personalized demo today and see exactly how Continuous transforms your capabilities, enhances data consistency, and delivers immediate value.

Reclaim Your Roadmap: Why In-House Usage Rating & Billing Logic Might Be Stalling Product Innovation

Posted on July 17, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Consumption-Based Pricing, Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, Usage-Based Pricing

Intro

Customers choose your product for the value your features deliver—not for the billing engine under the hood. While building usage rating and billing logic can initially offer control and flexibility, as complexity grows and new pricing models are introduced, engineering teams often find themselves burdened by ongoing maintenance of credit logic and billing rules.

After all, who knows your usage better than you? It seems logical to leverage that insight internally, especially when usage data also supports analytics, operations, and customer insights.

But what often starts as a well-intentioned and logical choice to maintain control can, as your business scales and product offerings evolve, introduce hidden complexity. Prepaid credits, tiered pricing, and sophisticated overage rules can turn initial flexibility into a significant drain on engineering time, focus, and resources, pulling them away from the innovations that truly set your product apart.

Tuning Your Custom Usage Rating and Billing Engine

For companies who’ve already invested in in-house rating and billing, the goal isn’t always a full rip-and-replace. It’s about optimizing your investment and strategically shifting additional complexity from your core product so you can scale more easily, move faster, and free engineers to build the capabilities that differentiate you.

Even well-built, custom usage rating and billing logic often encounters increasing friction as businesses scale and innovate:

Expertise Shortfall: Accurate usage-rating, billing, and revenue recognition rely on nuanced finance rules, tax regulations, and compliance standards. As new tiers or credit models emerge, keeping up with edge cases (proration, true-ups, audit trails) can become a specialist’s job, not a feature team’s.
On-Going Maintenance: Every pricing tweak—new discount tier, updated overage rate, expired credit pool—translates into code changes and QA cycles. That steady upkeep can quietly consume cycles meant for customer-facing innovation.
Fragile Integrations: Custom connections to Salesforce, NetSuite, or your own analytics stack can break when data models or schemas shift—leading to mismatches that require urgent fixes.
Performance Degradation: Running core revenue logic inside your application can introduce additional CPU, I/O, or network calls—potentially adding latency to user transactions and affecting overall system responsiveness, impacting the very experience your product aims to deliver.
Growing Technical Debt: Quick-win patches for one-off pricing or usage rules often become permanent fixtures. Over time, those patches form a web of interdependencies that slows every release, making your codebase harder to manage and evolve.
Roadmap Slowdown: When usage and billing logic is deeply embedded in your product, every update carries the risk of unintended side effects on rating or billing. This can significantly drag down feature velocity and delay crucial product roadmap items.
Audit & Compliance Overhead: Ensuring every transaction and revenue event is auditable and compliant with financial regulations (like SOX) requires complex logging and reconciliation, pulling engineers into non-feature work.

The good news? For many, the path forward isn’t necessarily a full rip-and-replace of existing systems. Instead, it’s about strategically offloading the operational complexities that slow you down, allowing you to optimize your current investment while reclaiming valuable engineering cycles.

Unlock Agility with Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

Instead of grappling with operational complexity in your product, shift it into a specialized layer that seamlessly plugs into the tools your teams already use. Embedded Revenue Infrastructure empowers you to:

Centralize metering and rating in a purpose-built service, keeping complex usage rating and billing logic out of your product code
Configure pricing models via UI, empowering non-technical teams to add or tweak usage tiers, prepaid credits, and rate plans without a single line of code.
Surface real-time usage insights directly in Salesforce, eliminating manual exports, custom integrations, and the delays of spreadsheet gymnastics.
Automate credit burn and revenue events through APIs, moving beyond manual scripts and batch jobs to ensure accuracy and efficiency.
Free engineers to focus on shipping features that truly propel your product forward and delight customers.

By strategically moving this logic out of your product codebase, you accelerate feature delivery, scale reliably, and eliminate the hidden costs of managing homegrown billing and rating.

Modern usage rating, billing, and overage management should always accelerate product velocity, not stall it. When facing complex pricing models—like prepaid credits, hybrid plans, or multi-phase commitments—the critical question for Product and Engineering leadership becomes: What logic is truly strategic to our core product, and what is operational infrastructure that pulls engineers away from building differentiating features? Your engineers need to focus on delivering that core innovation, not patching metering pipelines or maintaining invoicing scripts.

Ready to reclaim engineering time and scale without revenue headaches?

Schedule a personalized demo today and see exactly how Continuous transforms your capabilities, enhances data consistency, and delivers immediate value.

Make Every Day a Selling Event: Unlock Expansion Revenue with Usage & Prepaid Metrics

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Consumption-Based Pricing, Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, Usage-Based Pricing

How many upsells slipped through because your reps never saw the signal? As prepaid usage models become the SaaS standard, that blind spot costs quota and growth.

Every day, customers signal buying intent through usage spikes, burned-down credits, and feature engagement. But if your reps can’t see those signals, they can’t act. And that’s revenue left on the table.

Reps Can’t Sell What They Can’t See

Sales teams live in Salesforce, but usage and prepaid credit data usually doesn’t. It’s scattered across billing systems, siloed in finance-owned spreadsheets, or buried in your product, far from where selling happens.

Without visibility:

Reps miss the exact moment to expand or renew
Deals become harder to land, renewals get riskier, and churn risk rises
Customers get blindsided by surprise overages, eroding trust

When sales can’t see the signals, growth stalls.
Reps chase new logos while existing customers go untapped. Acquisition costs rise. Forecasts get shaky. And what should be low-effort expansions turn into missed quarters.

Usage & Prepaid Metrics Are Your Expansion Pipeline

Your next wave of pipeline isn’t in marketing leads—it’s hiding in product activity and prepaid consumption. Every usage spike or credit drawdown is a trigger for upsell. Every under-utilized plan is a retention warning.

Key signals include:

Usage spikes or growth trends signaling immediate need.
Low credit balances approaching zero, indicating an upsell window before overages occur.
Balances nearing expiration on prepaid commitments—prime time for renewal or upsell conversations.
Feature adoption patterns that hint at cross-sell opportunities.

These aren’t just health metrics, they’re daily, high-value selling signals.

Continuous Puts the Signals Where Sales Works

What if every buying signal showed up in Salesforce as it happens—usage spikes, low credit balances, looming expirations, and under-utilized features?
No external reports. No manual data hunts. Just timely, high-value signals delivered where reps already work.

Continuous brings usage and credit data into Salesforce with no extra systems and no added steps. Just the signals that matter into the tools you already use so sales teams can stop reacting and start anticipating.

Ready to See What Your Reps Are Missing?

Get a free Revenue Operations Assessment from our team. We’ll identify the biggest revenue signals hiding in your usage and prepaid data—and show you how to surface them in Salesforce, where your reps already work.

No cost, no commitment. Just insights. Request yours now, and one of our experts will reach out.

The End of Subscriptions: Why Prepaid Usage Models Are Replacing Traditional SaaS Pricing

Posted on June 3, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, NetSuite, Salesforce Revenue Cloud

The Shift That Broke the Subscription Model

For years, SaaS companies relied on subscriptions. Predictable pricing, recurring invoices, and standardized contracts became the default.

But that’s starting to change.

Today’s most successful tech companies—like Snowflake, AWS, and Databricks—are shifting to prepaid usage models: savings plans, credit pools, and enterprise commitments that tie revenue to actual product consumption.

This isn’t just a new pricing option. It’s a deeper change in how revenue is created, recognized, and managed. And it’s quickly becoming the standard for modern B2B software.

Subscriptions Worked—Until They Didn’t

The subscription model had a good run. It gave SaaS companies predictable revenue and simplified customer onboarding. But it was never really aligned with how customers use software. You committed to a package, paid every month or year, and hoped you got value out of it.

The result? A lot of shelfware. Unused seats. Over-provisioned tiers. Products collecting dust while the meter keeps running.

That misalignment was tolerated when usage was steady and predictable. Subscriptions were a step forward from perpetual licensing—but they never fully lived up to the SaaS promise of aligning pricing with value. As companies began consuming APIs, infrastructure, and services with highly variable demand, the cracks in the model became harder to ignore.

Customers wanted flexibility. Finance teams wanted efficiency. Vendors needed a better way to show value.

That’s when usage-based pricing entered the picture.

But going fully usage-based creates its own problems. It’s hard to forecast. Hard to budget. And it gives vendors no guarantee of revenue; even if the product is delivering real value.

That’s why the smartest companies aren’t choosing between subscriptions and usage—they’re adopting prepaid usage models that offer the best of both.

They’re not selling subscriptions. They’re not selling pure usage. They’re selling prepaid usage commitments: enterprise savings plans, credit pools, or drawdowns tied to forecasted demand. Customers lock in value. Vendors lock in a commitment. Revenue recognition starts when usage begins.

Why Pure Usage-Based Pricing Isn’t the Endgame

Moving from subscriptions to usage-based pricing was a big step forward. It aligned cost with value. If a customer uses more, they pay more. If they use less, they pay less. That feels fair—and for a while, it looked like the future.

But for both vendors and customers, pay-as-you-go has real limitations.

On the vendor side, usage volatility makes revenue hard to predict. Sales teams have less leverage to drive large deals. Finance teams can’t model growth with confidence.

On the customer side, it’s hard to budget. CFOs hate open-ended invoices. Procurement teams want predictability. Even if the pricing is fair, it feels risky.

That’s why most leading companies didn’t stop at usage-based pricing. They layered on prepaid usage models—enterprise savings plans, committed spend, or flex credits. These offer volume-based discounts in exchange for upfront commitments. Customers get flexibility. Vendors get predictability.

It’s not just about pricing differently. It’s about changing how both sides think about value and commitment.

Snowflake: The Playbook for Prepaid Usage at Scale

No company has popularized prepaid usage models more than Snowflake.

Snowflake doesn’t sell subscriptions or push seat-based packages. Instead, Snowflake sells usage commitments—enterprise contracts where customers prepay for credits they can draw down over time. It’s flexible for the customer and predictable for Snowflake. And it shows up in one powerful number: Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO).

As of their latest earnings, Snowflake reported $6.7 billion in RPO, up 34% year-over-year.

That number is huge. But here’s the part most people miss:

RPO isn’t recognized revenue. It’s just a committed contract. The revenue only lands when customers actually use the credits.

This is the heart of the prepaid usage model. You lock in a deal up front, but the real success depends on customer adoption. If usage lags, revenue recognition stalls. If usage spikes, revenue accelerates.

From the outside, it looks like Snowflake has cracked the code. In reality, they’ve built the infrastructure to make this model work—usage visibility, alignment across sales and success, and real-time data that ties consumption to value.

Most companies fall short. They adopt prepaid models but don’t operationalize them. Credit balances live in billing systems or spreadsheets. Customer-facing teams don’t know what’s been used. Finance can’t forecast. Sales can’t spot expansion.

The result? RPO just sits on the books instead of turning into revenue.

You Can’t Drive Revenue If You Can’t See the Credits

When revenue depends on prepaid commitments, credit visibility isn’t just a back-office metric. It’s a growth lever.

But in most companies, credit data is buried—tucked away in billing systems, or hidden in finance-owned spreadsheets. By the time someone realizes a customer hasn’t touched their credits, it’s too late to act.

That’s a problem:

If usage is lagging, it’s a customer success issue
If there’s a pile of unused credits, it’s a sales opportunity
If finance can’t see burn rates, it’s a forecasting risk

Yet almost no one surfaces this data in the tools where people actually work.

CSMs are in Salesforce. So are account execs. But the data they need to drive adoption, expansion, and renewals is stuck elsewhere. The result? Slower growth. Lower retention. Missed revenue.

The solution isn’t more reporting. It’s embedding credit visibility—balances, burn rates, usage trends—directly into CRM and ERP.

That’s how you align sales, success, and finance around what’s been committed, what’s been used, and what’s left to earn.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure: Built for the Prepaid Era

Most billing systems weren’t built for prepaid usage. Legacy vendors assumed static subscriptions and monthly renewals.

In response, a wave of new usage-based billing vendors emerged. Many handle ingestion and rating well—but that’s only part of the equation. But they’re usually standalone systems, disconnected from the tools teams actually use.

They solve for calculation—but not for adoption, visibility, or execution.

That’s where Continuous is different.

We’re a usage-based billing platform, too—but we’re built to work within your core systems. We don’t just calculate usage. We make it visible and actionable in Salesforce, NetSuite, and other platforms you already rely on.

Sales teams can see credit consumption on the customer record. Finance can forecast based on real-time usage. Customer success can intervene before credits go unused.

This is Embedded Revenue Infrastructure.

It’s not just billing. It’s infrastructure that helps teams turn prepaid commitments into recognized revenue—without another system to log into, and without another silo to manage.

Ready to Turn Prepaid Commitments Into Revenue?

Our Rapid Technical Assessment helps B2B teams understand what’s working, what’s not, and how to operationalize prepaid usage inside Salesforce and NetSuite.

We’ll review your current architecture, identify blockers, and map out how to unlock usage-based revenue—without adding another standalone system.

Request your free Revenue Operations Assessment
Get a tailored review of your current architecture and personalized insights on where Continuous can drive the most value.

👉 Fill out this quick form and one of our experts will follow up with your survey—no pressure, no commitment.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure: The End of Standalone Billing

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, NetSuite, Salesforce Revenue Cloud

Continuous Billing Workflows for Salesforce and NetSuite

Editor’s note: This post builds on Part 1 of our Embedded Revenue Infrastructure series, where we explored how SaaS billing evolved from subscription simplicity to usage-based complexity—and why traditional billing platforms can’t keep up.

In Part 2, we define the new approach: Embedded Revenue Infrastructure—and explain why it’s replacing standalone billing for modern B2B teams.

It’s time for a new approach.

For years, the promise of recurring billing platforms was simplicity. Standardize pricing. Automate invoices. Get paid faster.

But somewhere along the way, things got more complicated. Today, many B2B companies find themselves stuck between their CRM and ERP, trying to make a third system—the billing platform—play nice with everything else.

That third system often becomes a bottleneck. Teams waste time reconciling data, rebuilding product catalogs, and explaining invoices to confused customers. Pricing innovation slows to a crawl. The tools that were meant to streamline revenue operations now stand in the way.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure means monetization isn’t handled in a separate system. It’s woven into your core processes—from quoting to invoicing to revenue recognition.

This isn’t just a technical shift—it’s a philosophical one:

Billing should extend your existing workflows, not require an entirely new one.

The Three Principles of Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

1. Revenue Logic Embedded in Sales and Finance Workflows

Standalone billing platforms treat monetization as a separate domain. That leads to duplicated product catalogs, contract terms, and customer hierarchies.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure eliminates that duplication by placing pricing and billing logic directly inside your CRM and ERP.
Salesforce handles quoting. NetSuite handles invoicing. APIs connect to your usage data. Everyone works in the tools they already know.

Fewer integrations. Faster changes. Teams that stay in sync.

2. Flexible for Any Pricing Model

Modern businesses don’t just sell subscriptions. They sell prepaid credits, usage tiers, annual commitments, and complex hybrid models.

Most billing systems force you to contort your pricing strategy to fit their data model. Embedded Revenue Infrastructure flips that:

You define the pricing model. The system adapts.

That flexibility means faster time to market, better enterprise deal support, and less time rebuilding your stack with every pricing change.

3. Real-Time, Accurate, and Efficient

Traditional billing platforms rely on syncing data across systems. That leads to delays, mismatches, and costly reconciliation.

Embedded Revenue Infrastructure avoids all of that. Because revenue logic lives inside your workflows, your data stays accurate and real-time—without middleware or batch jobs.

Finance gets clean invoices. Sales sees real-time balances. Customers stop disputing bills. Everyone saves time.

Embedded vs. Standalone Billing: A Quick Comparison

Table comparing Embedded Revenue Infrastructure vs. Standalone Billing Platforms across architecture, pricing flexibility, system of record, deployment complexity, time to value, and change management.

Stop Comparing the Wrong Things

One of the biggest traps companies fall into is comparing billing platforms like commodity software. Who has the best quoting UI? Who supports more revenue recognition scenarios? Who automates more?

It’s not that those questions are wrong—they’re just based on the wrong assumption:
That billing needs to be a separate system at all.

Standalone vendors benefit from this thinking. It lets them justify rebuilding parts of your CRM and ERP. It turns them into the system of record for your most critical financial logic. And it locks you into a platform that wasn’t built to work with your stack—but to replace it.

A Different Starting Point

At Continuous, we started from a different place.
We asked:

What do our customers already have in place?
What’s already working?

Instead of building a “sticky” platform that replaces your core systems, we built a flexible layer that embeds into them—whether that’s Salesforce, NetSuite, or internal usage systems. This approach became Embedded Revenue Infrastructure. And it requires a different way of evaluating solutions.

The New Evaluation Criteria

Instead of asking who checks the most feature boxes, ask:

Will this solution extend or replace our CRM and ERP?
Can it embed into our existing quote-to-cash process—without starting over?
Is it flexible enough to meet us where we are and grow with us?

We Don’t Have a One-Size-Fits-All Answer

The truth is, we don’t know exactly how Continuous should be embedded in your stack until we understand your current architecture. That’s the point.

We believe architecture should follow your business—not the other way around.

Some customers use Salesforce CPQ and NetSuite Advanced Financials. Others use Revenue Cloud Advanced, Stripe, or homegrown metering. What they have in common is that Continuous fits into their existing stack—not the other way around.

That’s the real difference. And it’s why we believe Embedded Revenue Infrastructure is the future.

Ready to Simplify Sales and Finance?

Stop juggling disconnected systems and painful integrations.
Continuous helps unify your sales and finance processes by embedding directly into the platforms you already trust.

Request your free Revenue Operations Assessment
Get a tailored review of your current architecture and personalized insights on where Continuous can drive the most value.

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You Don’t Need Another Billing System—You Need a Better Approach

Posted on April 30, 2025 by Sean Joyce - Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, standalone billing, Usage-Based Pricing

Recurring billing vendors promised simplicity. As businesses shifted toward what became known as the “Subscription Economy,” CRM, ERP, and customer-facing (front-office) systems lacked native support for recurring revenue models, creating operational gaps that gave rise to specialized vendors—”SaaS Recurring Billing“—to bridge the divide.

Today, customer expectations have evolved dramatically. Businesses now face greater complexity as customers demand flexible, personalized options for consuming and paying for products and services. This complexity significantly impacts front-office sales processes and drives downstream billing and reporting challenges.

While CRM and ERP platforms like Salesforce and NetSuite have responded to these evolving demands by continually innovating and enhancing their capabilities, the standalone billing vendors—both legacy providers and new entrants—have largely failed to keep pace. Instead of true innovation, these vendors have continued promoting a “third cloud” model that positions standalone platforms between CRM, ERP, and front-office systems. This outdated approach results in operational fragmentation and duplicated efforts, rather than genuine improvement.

Before exploring why standalone billing platforms inherently struggle, we must first clearly understand the essential pillars of every modern B2B organization’s revenue infrastructure:

CRM, ERP, and Front-Office Systems: Essential Pillars of Revenue Infrastructure
Effective revenue operations depend on three interconnected core platforms:

Infographic Showing CRM, ERP, and Front-Office Systems

CRM Systems: Excel in managing customer relationships, deal structuring, quoting, and flexible pricing management. Salesforce provides robust examples of integrated quoting and subscription management directly within CRM workflows.

ERP Systems: Focused on financial accuracy, compliance, revenue recognition, and accounts receivable. Platforms like NetSuite integrate comprehensive financial management aligned closely with accounting processes.

Customer/Front-Office Systems: Include platforms such as e-commerce, self-service portals, and internal product systems that manage customer engagement, subscriptions, credits, and prepayments, capturing the precise usage data critical for billing and monetization.

Additionally, specialized capabilities such as tax calculation engines, payment gateways, and specialized usage management systems can provide significant value if effectively connected to the core revenue stack. For companies already invested in specialized usage management solutions, leveraging these systems within a unified revenue infrastructure is crucial to ensure seamless interoperability and to avoid redundant or fragmented processes.

Together, these core systems should form a cohesive and unified revenue infrastructure. Effective monetization solutions must complement and enhance these systems—not duplicate or disrupt them.

Why Standalone Billing Platforms Fail to Deliver

Standalone billing platforms typically fall into three categories, each with inherent limitations and a critical shared flaw:

Quote-to-Revenue Platforms: While these newer entrants accurately recognize the importance of cohesive front-to-back-office collaboration, their strategy of replicating pricing, configuration, quoting, billing, revenue recognition, and collections capabilities within a single solution proves impractical at scale. Inevitably, they cannot match the depth and flexibility of dedicated CRM and ERP systems.

Legacy Subscription Management Solutions: Initially built for simple subscription models, these systems struggle significantly with complex usage-based or hybrid monetization strategies. Attempting to address complexity, many legacy vendors developed their own CPQ tools around their proprietary billing catalogs, which are inherently limited compared to modern CPQ systems.

Usage-Based Billing Platforms: These specialized platforms excel at usage rating but struggle to clearly define how their capabilities seamlessly integrate into broader CRM, ERP, and front-office ecosystems, often resulting in redundant configurations and operational friction.

The fundamental flaw shared by these SaaS Recurring Billers is their reliance on multiple disconnected product catalogs. Defining sales rules in CRM and separately redefining them in billing systems inevitably introduces complexity, data discrepancies, and costly integration challenges.

Infographic Showing SaaS Recurring Billing Vendor Challenges

Symptoms Your Revenue Infrastructure Is Breaking Down

How do you know if your revenue infrastructure is failing to support your business effectively? Look for these recognizable symptoms:

Forced Manual Handoffs: Sales and finance teams repeatedly re-enter or manually adjust data because your sales and billing systems don’t talk to each other efficiently.
Slow Pricing and Packaging Changes: Launching new pricing strategies or monetization models requires extensive IT projects and lengthy configurations.
Billing Inaccuracies and Revenue Leakage: Persistent discrepancies between quoted prices and billed amounts cause customer frustration and lost revenue.
Internal Team Frustration: Sales, finance, and revenue operations teams are misaligned, each blaming the other for process inefficiencies and delays.
Engineering and IT Overload: Significant resources are spent maintaining fragile custom integrations and resolving data conflicts rather than focusing on strategic initiatives.

These symptoms aren’t just operational headaches—they’re clear indicators that your revenue infrastructure needs immediate attention.businesses to build complex integrations, making it harder to achieve a seamless sales-to-finance workflow.

The Future: Introducing Embedded Revenue Infrastructure

Infographic Showing Continuous Revenue Infrastructure and a Seamless Workflow

The true issue is not any single billing solution but the outdated concept of a standalone “third cloud.” Originally necessary when CRM, ERP, and front-office systems were immature, this approach now struggles under modern monetization demands.

The future of revenue management demands Embedded Revenue Infrastructure—an innovative model that integrates advanced pricing, usage tracking, billing, and revenue logic directly into existing CRM, ERP, and front-office systems. This approach eliminates redundant catalogs and complex integrations, creating a unified, agile, and scalable foundation for revenue operations.

In our next blog, we’ll dive deeper into Embedded Revenue Infrastructure, explore its transformative potential, and show precisely how it addresses these critical operational challenges.

Ready to simplify your sales and finance processes?

Stop juggling fragmented systems and costly integrations. At Continuous, we unify your sales and finance workflows by building on the trusted CRM and ERP platforms you already use.

Request your free Revenue Operations Assessment from Continuous and get expert insights tailored specifically to your business—no cost, no commitment. Simply fill out this quick form, and one of our experts will reach out with your assessment survey.