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.
Embedded vs. Standalone Billing: A Quick Comparison
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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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:
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.
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
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.
Continuous, the first embedded pricing and revenue solution purpose-built for Salesforce and NetSuite, is excited to announce a strategic partnership with AscribeIT, specialists in CPQ, billing automation, early adopters of outcome-based pricing, and revenue operations excellence. This collaboration empowers enterprises to efficiently deploy and optimize advanced pricing and monetization models directly within their CRM and ERP environments, eliminating the typical headaches of standalone billing systems.
Better Together
Companies today face increasing pressure to deploy sophisticated monetization strategies—including hybrid subscription plans, usage-based pricing, and innovative credit management models. However, traditional billing solutions often complicate rather than streamline these processes, creating unnecessary friction between Sales, Finance, and IT teams.
Continuous seamlessly integrates powerful pricing, rating, and credit management capabilities directly into Salesforce and NetSuite, allowing businesses to leverage their existing systems without costly integrations or silos. AscribeIT uses Continuous as a complement to core applications by providing expert implementation and strategic guidance around Salesforce solutions like Revenue Cloud Advanced, ensuring smooth adoption and rapid operational improvements.
Together, Continuous and AscribeIT enable customers to:
Rapidly deploy and scale innovative pricing strategies directly within Salesforce and ERP solutions including NetSuite, Intacct, and others
Align sales, finance, and IT processes into a single, cohesive ecosystem.
Automate and simplify revenue operations, significantly reducing manual effort and error rates.
A Collaborative Approach to Revenue Operations
AscribeIT brings deep expertise in configuring and optimizing CPQ and billing solutions, helping customers align technology with business processes effectively. Continuous enhances these implementations by embedding sophisticated rating and monetization capabilities directly into Salesforce and NetSuite, eliminating the limitations of traditional standalone billing systems. This approach enables specific use cases including prepaid credit management, advanced usage-based billing scenarios, consumption-based pricing models, and hybrid monetization strategies.
Perspectives from Our Leadership
“We’re excited to partner with AscribeIT,” said Sean Joyce, Co-founder and Head of Alliances at Continuous. “Their proven expertise in CPQ and billing automation perfectly complements our embedded monetization approach. Together, we’re making complex revenue operations simpler and more efficient, allowing enterprises to quickly implement innovative pricing strategies.”
“Continuous solves a critical challenge for our customers by providing robust, real-time pricing and rating capabilities directly inside their existing systems,” said Avinash Boyana, Partner Alliance Director at AscribeIT. “Our combined solutions simplify and accelerate complex monetization scenarios, enabling our customers to streamline operations and rapidly scale their revenue strategies.”
Looking Ahead
This strategic partnership between Continuous and AscribeIT positions both companies to deliver immediate and sustainable value to customers aiming to modernize their revenue operations. By combining best-in-class embedded revenue technology with expert implementation services, customers can confidently transition to sophisticated monetization models while maintaining seamless operational alignment.
To explore how Continuous and AscribeIT can streamline your revenue operations, please contact us or visit our partnership page for more information.
About Continuous
Continuous provides the first embedded pricing and revenue platform specifically designed to enhance Salesforce and NetSuite, enabling enterprises to quickly launch and scale complex usage, credit, and hybrid monetization models without standalone billing systems. By leveraging existing CRM and ERP investments, Continuous delivers unmatched flexibility, scalability, and speed to market. Learn more.
About AscribeIT
AscribeIT has a combined experience of more than 30 years delivering RevOps solutions across all market segments, being the ultimate choice to transform revenue operations. Learn more.
In Part 1, we introduced Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) and its vision for end-to-end monetization. In Part 2, we explored how RCA supports usage-based pricing—and how Continuous enhances it for scale.
Now, in Part 3, we’re focusing on readiness. For some companies, RCA is the clear next step. For others, continuing to optimize legacy CPQ and/or Billing may be the right call for now. We’re sharing what we’ve learned from working with our customers: the most common readiness gaps that hold teams back from realizing RCA’s full potential—and how to close them before making the move.
You’ve implemented Salesforce CPQ—or even CPQ + Billing. You’ve standardized quoting, brought pricing and approvals into Salesforce, and made major strides toward scalable revenue operations. But as your business grows and your pricing models evolve, you may be asking: What about RCA?
For many organizations, the next step is Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA)—and the opportunity to modernize monetization even further.
Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) introduces a fully native Salesforce architecture purpose-built for modern revenue operations. It supports more flexible pricing models—including usage-based—and brings quoting, contracting, and billing closer together within a composable, API-first framework.
But the move to RCA isn’t right for everyone and some may benefit from continuing to optimize their current CPQ or CPQ + Billing investment. At Continuous, we help customers navigate these decisions every day, providing scalable solutions that bridge the gap between CPQ and RCA.
Not Everyone Needs to Move to RCA (Yet)
Moving to RCA now isn’t the right fit for every organization. If your organization recently invested in Salesforce CPQ (with or without Salesforce Billing), the last thing you want is to disrupt that deployment. Instead, your goal is likely to get even more value out of your current investment.
That’s exactly where Continuous comes in. Continuous enhances Salesforce CPQ by seamlessly adding support for complex usage, consumption, and credit-based pricing scenarios—all without introducing new billing silos. Even better, Continuous enables you to fully leverage NetSuite as your financial system of record, allowing for streamlined payments, collections, invoicing, and revenue reporting directly within your existing ERP environment.
With Continuous you can:
Support advanced usage, consumption, and hybrid pricing models directly within Salesforce CPQ.
Fully leverage NetSuite for financial reporting, invoicing, collections, and revenue recognition.
Extend—not replace—the significant investment you’ve already made in Salesforce CPQ.
If your team is feeling pressure to move to Revenue Cloud Advanced but wants a more strategic path forward, start by requesting a free RCA Readiness Assessment. We’ll show you how to enhance what you already have, so you can move to RCA (or any advanced solution) only when—and if—it truly makes sense for your business.
What We’re Seeing In The Market: Success Meets Operational Reality
At Continuous, while we work with companies who are deep into CPQ or CPQ Billing, five patterns consistently emerge:
Your Customer Experience Shouldn’t Depend on Support Tickets → Most customers can’t see their usage, credit balances, or contract details—so they open support tickets for basic questions. This reactive model frustrates users, burdens internal teams, and erodes trust—especially in usage-based models where real-time visibility is expected.
When SKUs Don’t Map to Value, Trust Breaks Down → Workarounds that helped get CPQ live or bring a new product to market—like placeholder SKUs or loosely defined product hierarchies—create quoting confusion and billing disconnects, leaving customers unsure of what they purchased or why they were charged.
Governance Gaps and Swivel Chair Handoffs Create a Loop of Rework and Risk →What began as flexible CPQ configuration has evolved into a patchwork of overrides, manual workarounds, and uncontrolled customizations. Even after deals are signed, corrections are still required before revenue can be recognized. The result: delayed deals, inconsistent data, and ongoing rework across Sales, RevOps, and Finance
Unstructured or Manual Consumption Data → As businesses shift and are eager to monetize consumption— the supporting data simply isn’t there. Usage data is often captured inconsistently, defined differently across products, or manually maintained in spreadsheets—if it’s tracked at all. Sales teams miss clear signals for upsells or expansion, Finance can’t reconcile revenue, and customers are left in the dark about what they’ve used or why they’re being charged—limiting revenue growth and customer trust.
Fragmented, Disconnected Lifecycle Events Derail Growth → Renewals, amendments, and cancellations are often managed through manual workarounds or outside systems—like spreadsheets, net-new quotes, or support tickets. This leads to duplicate records, conflicting contract data, customer confusion, and unreliable revenue and renewal reporting.
Recognize these challenges? Let’s talk about how Continuous can help your team tackle them today, before they stall your growth.
Is Your Business RCA-Ready?
RCA assumes a strong foundation—but that’s where many teams struggle. Before diving in, ask yourself:
Is our product catalog standardized and enforceable?
Do our SKUs map to value—for us and our customers?
Is our usage data reliable and available in real-time?
Are renewals, amendments, and cancellations governed and aligned?
Can Sales, Finance, and Customers all see the same thing?
Without that foundation, even the best RCA implementation can fall short of expectations.
How Continuous Extends RCA
Continuous doesn’t replace RCA—we make it stronger. We embed directly into your Salesforce environment, working alongside RCA to:
Extend RCA to NetSuite or any ERP—no middleware required
Standardize SKUs and Rate Plans across sales and billing
Mediate and rate usage data at scale, in real time
Enable enterprise credit pools, prepayments, and true-ups
Align lifecycle events (renewals, expansions, cancellations) across Salesforce and ERP
And because Continuous is Salesforce-native, your teams stay in the systems they already know. No duplicate catalogs. No disconnected workflows.
RCA opens the door to modern revenue operations—but the difference between deploying it and unlocking its full value comes down to readiness.
Request a free RCA Readiness Assessment
Request your free RCA Readiness 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 RCA experts will reach out with your assessment survey.
Continuous, the first embedded pricing and revenue solution purpose-built for Salesforce and NetSuite, is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Milo Massimo, experts in Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) implementation and strategic advisory. This collaboration simplifies and accelerates how enterprises operationalize advanced consumption and credit-based pricing models directly within their existing CRM and ERP environments—without introducing additional billing silos.
Why This Partnership Matters
Today, businesses are rapidly adopting sophisticated pricing strategies like consumption-based and prepaid credit models. Yet many find themselves hindered by the complexity of legacy billing tools and challenging integrations between sales (CRM) and finance (ERP) systems.
Continuous uniquely solves this challenge by seamlessly integrating advanced usage rating, credit management, and flexible pricing directly into Salesforce and NetSuite. Milo Massimo complements this capability by providing deep, process-driven expertise in deploying and optimizing Salesforce Revenue Cloud environments, ensuring seamless alignment between sales and finance processes.
Together, Continuous and Milo Massimo offer a complete solution, enabling enterprise customers to:
Quickly launch and scale complex credit and usage-based pricing models.
Maintain a single integrated ecosystem across Salesforce CRM and NetSuite ERP.
Eliminate manual processes, reduce errors, and accelerate revenue cycles.
Shared Vision, Complementary Strengths
Milo Massimo’s extensive experience with Salesforce Revenue Cloud and their process-first implementation methodology ensures clients achieve streamlined, user-friendly experiences. Continuous enhances these implementations by providing powerful, flexible billing capabilities specifically tailored for sophisticated monetization scenarios, eliminating the need for costly customizations or standalone billing silos.
Insights from Our Teams
“We’re thrilled to partner with Milo Massimo,” said Sean Joyce, Co-founder and Head of Alliances at Continuous. “Milo Massimo’s unmatched expertise in Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced implementations aligns perfectly with our mission of simplifying consumption-based monetization. Together, we’re empowering companies to rapidly adopt innovative pricing strategies without disrupting their existing sales and finance systems.”
“Continuous fills a critical gap for our clients,” said Maria Warheit, CEO of Milo Massimo. “With their real-time usage rating and robust credit management capabilities, Continuous allows us to implement sophisticated monetization strategies directly within Salesforce Revenue Cloud and NetSuite. This partnership ensures our clients can innovate quickly and scale.”
What’s Next?
This strategic partnership positions Continuous and Milo Massimo to deliver rapid value to enterprise customers looking for a seamless way to manage consumption and credit-based monetization. Our joint solutions offer businesses a clear pathway to modernize their quote-to-cash processes, driving efficiency and unlocking new revenue opportunities.
To learn more about how Continuous and Milo Massimo can transform your monetization approach, please contact us or visit our partnership page for additional details.
About Continuous
Continuous provides the first embedded pricing and revenue platform specifically designed to enhance Salesforce and NetSuite, enabling enterprises to quickly launch and scale complex usage, credit, and hybrid monetization models without standalone billing systems. By leveraging existing CRM and ERP investments, Continuous delivers unmatched flexibility, scalability, and speed to market. Learn more.
About Milo Massimo
Milo Massimo is a consultancy built around making Salesforce Revenue Cloud work at scale across industries. Combining strategic advisory and hands-on implementation, Milo Massimo helps enterprises streamline revenue operations, eliminate friction, and realize faster outcomes across Sales and Finance. Learn more.
Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced (RCA) is redefining modern revenue lifecycle management by unifying quoting, contracts, billing, and order management into a seamless, native Salesforce experience. Businesses adopting RCA benefit from enhanced automation, flexible pricing models, and streamlined collaboration across sales, finance, and legal teams.
But, as businesses evolve beyond traditional subscriptions toward usage-based pricing, they’re discovering powerful new opportunities—and equally complex challenges. Usage-based pricing, now the gold standard in SaaS, cloud, telecom, and technology industries, directly ties revenue to the actual value customers receive, creating stronger customer relationships and more dynamic revenue streams.
Building upon our previous primer on Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced, this deeper dive explores how RCA supports usage-based pricing and rating, highlighting areas where Continuous significantly enhances RCA capabilities including:
Advanced rating and high usage volumes
Real-time usage mediation and aggregation, ensuring timely and accurate handoff to finance systems for comprehensive visibility across sales, customer service, finance teams, and customers.
Credit balance, prepayment, and enterprise savings plans
We’ll outline RCA’s strengths, identify critical considerations, and illustrate how Continuous enhances RCA capabilities—particularly around scalability, compliance, financial accuracy, and seamless ERP integration.
Whether you’re currently using Salesforce CPQ & Billing, considering RCA, or exploring consumption-based pricing, this guide provides essential insights for mastering usage-driven revenue models.
How does Salesforce RCA simplify usage-based billing?
Salesforce RCA differentiates itself through several core features:
Unified Salesforce-Native Architecture: RCA is fully built on Salesforce’s core platform, eliminating the previous reliance on managed packages inherent to Salesforce CPQ & Billing. This architecture leverages Salesforce’s robust scalability, security, and integration capabilities as well as enabling easy upgrades using Salesforce’s seasonal release schedule.
API-First Composable Architecture: RCA offers an API-first, composable approach, empowering customers to selectively deploy the elements of RCA they specifically require—including complex configuration, dynamic revenue orchestration, contract lifecycle management, and usage-based selling and billing. This modular flexibility enables rapid adaptation to evolving business models without the need for wholesale system replacements.
Real-Time Visibility via Digital Wallet: RCA’s digital wallet provides immediate, transparent tracking of credit balances and usage commitments, forming a robust foundation for credit and commitment-based pricing models. This visibility empowers sales, finance, customer service teams, and customers themselves to proactively manage usage, ensure contractual compliance, and adapt quickly to changing consumption patterns.
How Continuous Complements Salesforce RCA
Continuous builds on the already robust foundation provided by Salesforce RCA, empowering companies to confidently evolve their pricing models without needing to replace their existing sales or billing systems. By enhancing RCA’s capabilities, Continuous addresses complex scenarios and enterprise-scale challenges:
Enhanced Scalability for High-Volume Data
During peak periods, usage data can significantly exceed typical volumes. Continuous provides an off-platform rating engine optimized for large data volumes, preserving Salesforce’s responsiveness and efficiency.
Support for Real-Time Usage Mediation and Rating
Customers benefit from immediate insight into their usage. Continuous complements RCA’s periodic data aggregation with real-time mediation and rating capabilities, ensuring accurate, up-to-the-minute visibility.
Advanced Credit Balance and Enterprise Management
Visibility into commitment progress is crucial for sales, customer service, finance teams, and customers themselves. Continuous ensures synchronized visibility across Salesforce, ERP, and other platforms:
Enterprise-Wide Credit Pools: Centralized credit management across multiple departments or subsidiaries.
Automated Credit Rollovers and Replenishments: Seamless, automated credit management aligned with contractual agreements.
Complex True-Up Calculations: Real-time monitoring and adjustments, ensuring billing accuracy and compliance across all systems.
Streamlined Financial Integration and Compliance
Continuous seamlessly integrates RCA’s sales-driven rating processes with ERP and accounting systems, including a productized integration specifically for NetSuite, while remaining flexible enough to support any downstream financial application. By embedding the Continuous Revenue Fabric within RCA, Continuous ensures an optimal handoff tailored to the specific needs of revenue operations and finance teams. This approach provides finance teams with a complete and reliable financial system of record, delivering comprehensive visibility and significantly reducing manual reconciliation efforts.
Advanced Pricing Insights and Analytics
Continuous provides advanced analytics and pricing capabilities, enabling customers and sales teams to more accurately estimate and price usage-based offerings. This facilitates precise determination of prepaid credit amounts and commitments required upfront. Additionally, Continuous can leverage actual customer usage data to deliver powerful insights through integration with leading analytics tools like Tableau or Snowflake, driving informed decision-making and enhanced revenue growth.
Real-World Scenario: Cloud Infrastructure Company
Consider a cloud infrastructure company offering platform subscriptions paired with usage-based, pay-as-you-go charges. They manage highly complex rating scenarios involving millions of usage records that need to be assessed across multiple attributes to accurately reflect how the platform is used.
Initially, customers utilize a pure pay-as-you-go model but the company aims to transition them toward prepaid commitments using virtual currency credits. RCA provides foundational support through robust rate cards and digital wallet visibility, enabling the sales and customer success teams to track usage effectively.
Continuous further enhances RCA by managing extremely high usage volumes off-platform, providing real-time mediation and aggregation of billions of records without impacting Salesforce performance. This capability allows precise, multi-attribute rating essential for accurate billing.
Moreover, Continuous ensures seamless integration with their ERP, NetSuite, ensuring that detailed usage data and credit consumption are fully visible for critical financial processes including Accounts Receivable, Revenue Recognition, and Financial Reporting. Additionally, by utilizing actual customer usage data, Continuous facilitates accurate cost estimates that help customers confidently transition to prepaid commitments.
Finally, the enriched usage data integrated into analytics tools like Tableau or Snowflake empowers broader business insights, influencing strategic decisions beyond billing—such as product development, customer retention strategies, and marketing initiatives.
Ready to Optimize Your Usage-Based Pricing and Billing? Talk to Our Experts Today
Together, Salesforce RCA and Continuous provide a comprehensive solution optimized for complex, consumption-driven scenarios. This combined approach ensures scalability, real-time accuracy, advanced credit management, financial compliance, and actionable analytics, empowering businesses to confidently scale their usage-based revenue models.
Whether you are a current Salesforce Revenue Cloud user, considering an upgrade to Revenue Cloud Advanced, or simply navigating challenges operationalizing usage and credit-based pricing, Continuous is here to help. Reach out to us today to discuss —Connect with our consumption-based pricing experts
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What types of businesses benefit most from Salesforce RCA and Continuous? Any business using complex pricing models, particularly in SaaS, cloud services, telecom, or technology, will greatly benefit from RCA combined with Continuous.
Can Continuous work with other Salesforce applications such as CPQ & Billing? Yes, Continuous extends any Salesforce application including Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce CPQ & Billing.
Can Continuous integrate with ERP systems other than NetSuite? Yes, Continuous has a productized integration for NetSuite but can also integrate seamlessly with virtually any ERP or downstream financial system.
Do I need to replace my current Salesforce deployment to use Continuous? No, Continuous complements and enhances your existing Salesforce setup, allowing you to extend capabilities without replacing your core deployment.
How does Continuous support large-scale data requirements? Continuous uses an off-platform rating engine optimized for extremely high data volumes, managing billions of records monthly without affecting Salesforce performance.
Can you explain the difference between Salesforce CPQ & Billing and Revenue Cloud Advanced? Salesforce CPQ & Billing originated from Salesforce’s acquisition of Steelbrick and InvoiceIT, and thus still relies on managed packages. Revenue Cloud Advanced, on the other hand, is fully built on Salesforce’s core platform. It leverages an API-driven, composable architecture, bringing forward all the strengths of the original CPQ & Billing solution while offering significantly enhanced flexibility, scalability, and integration capabilities.
How is Continuous different from other usage-based billing systems? Traditional usage-based billing applications require businesses to set up products within their own separate billing catalogs and then integrate these catalogs with sales tools like Salesforce—an approach that often creates complexity, cost, and maintenance challenges. Continuous eliminates this complexity by embedding directly within Salesforce’s existing product catalog through native AppExchange extensions. This unique embedded “revenue fabric” approach ensures businesses can manage all pricing and packaging directly within Salesforce, completely removing the need for complex billing system integrations. Additionally, Continuous ensures your existing financial system—such as NetSuite—remains the financial system of record, avoiding duplication of functionality and the cost and complexity associated with maintaining integrations. This embedded approach ensures coordinated visibility and control across revenue operations and finance teams, allowing businesses to leverage the full capabilities of both Salesforce and their ERP solutions.
Salesforce has long been at the center of the revenue management conversation, helping businesses scale their sales and finance operations with tools like Sales Cloud, Salesforce CPQ & Billing, and Commerce Cloud. With the launch of Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced, Salesforce is taking a significant leap forward—positioning itself as the end-to-end solution for modern revenue lifecycle management.
This shift is driven by the need for businesses to monetize more complex pricing models—including subscriptions, hybrid models, and usage-based pricing—while ensuring seamless integration between sales and finance teams. Revenue Cloud Advanced is designed to unify these processes within Salesforce, but it also raises important considerations for finance leaders who need to maintain existing ERP investments.
This primer explores what Revenue Cloud Advanced is, its core capabilities, and what businesses should consider when evaluating the transition.
What is Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced?
Revenue Cloud Advanced is Salesforce’s next-generation revenue management platform, designed to support the full quote-to-cash process within Salesforce. It integrates quoting, contract lifecycle management, order management, and billing into a single, natively built Salesforce experience.
Salesforce is positioning RCA as a unified system that eliminates silos between sales, finance, and legal teams. Instead of relying on multiple integrated solutions, businesses can manage their entire revenue process on the Salesforce Platform—with automation, AI-driven insights, and embedded finance functionality.
Key Capabilities of Revenue Cloud Advanced
Salesforce RCA introduces several powerful capabilities:
Unified Data Model – Built natively on Salesforce, ensuring real-time data flow across the entire revenue lifecycle without the need for complex integrations. Because Revenue Cloud Advanced runs on Salesforce Core, customers benefit from access to all new features with every seasonal release. Additionally, this architecture makes it easier to support models like self-service, as all Salesforce products can seamlessly leverage the Revenue Cloud Advanced engine.
Flexible Product and Pricing Models – Businesses can now configure a single product with multiple pricing models (one-time, subscription, usage-based) without duplicating product records.
Enhanced AI and Guided Selling – Agentforce supports automated pricing recommendations, contract drafting, and approval workflows, reducing sales cycle friction.
Dynamic Revenue Orchestration (DRO) – Automates complex order decomposition, fulfillment, and billing processes, enabling seamless execution of multi-stage transactions (e.g., software provisioning, physical shipments, recurring services).
Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) – Streamlines the contract process by automating contract creation, negotiation, approvals, execution, and ongoing management.
API-First Architecture – Headless APIs allow Revenue Cloud Advanced to be embedded in e-commerce platforms, partner portals, and external sales channels.
Usage-Based Pricing & The Shift Toward Flexible Monetization
Salesforce recognizes that businesses are increasingly adopting consumption-based and hybrid pricing models. Revenue Cloud Advanced is designed to support these models by allowing businesses to configure, sell, and manage usage-based products natively within Salesforce.
However, Revenue Cloud Advanced provides robust native capabilities for quoting and managing usage-based pricing. For high-volume businesses requiring complex mediation and rating at scale, complementary solutions like Continuous ensure seamless automation and financial alignment.. High-volume businesses—such as SaaS, cloud services, and telecom—will still need to ensure that their finance teams have the tools required for rating and revenue recognition.
Integrating Revenue Cloud Advanced with ERP and Financial Systems
One of the biggest questions finance leaders face when evaluating Revenue Cloud Advanced is: How does this impact our ERP strategy?
Salesforce is positioning Revenue Cloud Advanced as a modern, flexible revenue operations platform that seamlessly integrates with existing ERP investments while streamlining revenue workflows. For companies with ERP investments in platforms like NetSuite, SAP, and Oracle, Revenue Cloud Advanced ensures a seamless integration, helping finance teams streamline revenue operations without disrupting their existing workflows. These systems remain critical for revenue recognition, general ledger reporting, and financial compliance.
Revenue Cloud Advanced supports API-based integrations with ERPs, ensuring that businesses don’t have to completely shift their financial operations into Salesforce. Instead, companies can leverage Salesforce as their revenue operations hub while maintaining ERP workflows for accounts receivable, taxation, and compliance.
For a seamless integration between Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced and NetSuite, our Continuous for NetSuite Advanced Financials SuiteApp ensures automated data handoff between sales and finance, eliminating manual reconciliations and streamlining invoicing and revenue recognition.
For finance teams, this means:
More automation in revenue management, reducing the need for manual reconciliations between Salesforce and ERP.
Real-time rated usage data flows, ensuring finance has full visibility into consumption-driven revenue streams.
Accurate revenue recognition compliance with standards like ASC 606 by ensuring that invoicing and revenue schedules align between Salesforce and ERP.
Is Revenue Cloud Advanced Right for Your Business?
If your business is already using Salesforce for revenue management, Revenue Cloud Advanced represents a powerful opportunity to modernize quote-to-cash operations. However, the transition requires careful consideration, particularly if your finance team depends on ERP-driven billing, rating, and compliance workflows.
Key evaluation questions:
Do you need more flexibility in pricing models, including subscriptions, usage-based, and hybrid models?
Is reducing dependency on custom integrations a priority for your sales and finance teams?
Does your finance team need advanced revenue automation and real-time billing workflows?
How will your ERP interact with Salesforce if you transition to Revenue Cloud Advanced?
Salesforce’s vision is clear: Revenue Cloud Advanced is the future of quote-to-cash on Salesforce. However, businesses need to align this vision with their own finance operations, ensuring that ERP integration and usage-based billing scalability are part of the strategy.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced is an exciting step forward for businesses looking to streamline and automate revenue operations. As organizations evaluate the transition, the key will be ensuring that their quote-to-cash processes remain scalable, finance-friendly, and aligned with ERP investments.
For businesses exploring the best path forward, expertise in Salesforce revenue solutions, finance operations, and usage-based monetization will be critical. With the right strategy, Revenue Cloud Advanced can deliver the flexibility and automation that modern businesses need—without disrupting financial workflows.
Talk to an Expert
Looking to optimize your revenue operations with Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced? Connect with our consumption-based pricing experts to learn how we can help you unlock the full potential of usage-based and hybrid pricing models.
Coming Up Next
📌 Next in this series: Supercharging Salesforce Revenue Cloud Advanced for Usage-Based Pricing & Rating at Scale—How to Extend RCA for High-Volume and Complex Monetization Models.
On August 6, 2024, Gartner released their latest “Magic Quadrant for Recurring Billing Applications“ followed by Forrester’s “The Recurring Billing Solutions Landscape, Q3 2024“ on September 3, 2024. These reports assess a competitive landscape that has been evolving for over a decade, evaluating vendors based on their ability to manage the entire sales-to-finance process for recurring billing.
While these reports are valuable, they also reveal a deeper problem in the industry—a problem rooted in how standalone billing systems approach the recurring billing challenge. At Continuous, we believe the way the market has evolved has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the recurring billing problem, making it difficult for analysts to cover accurately and even more painful for customers to select the right solutions.
Both the Gartner and Forrester reports rank vendors based on their ability to handle the entire recurring billing lifecycle, which includes tasks such as:
Sales Process and Quoting: Creating flexible pricing models and accurate quotes within the sales cycle, ensuring they align seamlessly with both CRM and billing systems.
Contracting: Managing the transition from quoting to contracts, including drafting, signing, and handling amendments or renewals, while integrating pricing and terms from the sales process.
Service Provisioning: Setting up and activating services according to contract terms, tracking usage in real-time to ensure accurate billing.
Usage Data Collection and Rating: Capturing, mediating, and rating usage data in real-time, applying pricing rules to ensure accurate and scalable billing for consumption-based models.
Billing and Invoice Generation: Consolidating one time, periodic and usage charges into detailed invoices, ensuring timely delivery to customers via their preferred channels.
Payment Processing: Facilitating payment collection, managing recurring payments, and ensuring accurate reconciliation with financial systems.
Revenue Recognition and Financial Reporting: Ensuring compliance with accounting standards by accurately recognizing revenue and providing detailed financial reports that integrate with the ERP system.
These tasks encompass a wide range of functions traditionally handled by CRM (Sales) and ERP (Finance) platforms. However, over the past decade, specialized billing vendors have emerged to address gaps in these systems. Their solution? Introduce a “billing system of record” – a third platform that sits between CRM and ERP to manage these critical processes. This shift has created a new category of software, one that analysts like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and others are now tasked with evaluating.
The Rise of Standalone Billing Systems: A New Category Emerges
Around 2010, a belief took hold that CRM and ERP vendors couldn’t handle the increasing complexity of billing as companies shifted from traditional perpetual license models to subscription billing models. In response, a range of specialized billing systems began emerging, offering solutions to support this new “Subscription Economy”.
By 2017, this new category of standalone billing systems had matured enough to receive formal analyst coverage, leading to the release of reports like the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave. These vendors promised to simplify recurring billing by offering a third-party solution that could manage the billing lifecycle independently. This trend accelerated as consumption and prepaid credit models gained popularity, leading to the crowded market landscape we see today.
But here’s the issue: billing is not, and never should be, a standalone process. It’s intertwined with sales, finance, and customer management. When billing is siloed into a separate platform, businesses are forced to build complex integrations, juggle multiple systems, and deal with costly maintenance—problems that CRM and ERP systems were originally designed to solve.
What These Reports Reveal: Complexity, Not Simplicity
The criteria used by Gartner and Forrester to evaluate vendors include tasks that traditionally belong within the domains of CRM and ERP systems. However, instead of enhancing these core systems, standalone billing vendors have introduced an unnecessary third layer of complexity.
Consider the following:
Quote Creation and Negotiation are native functions of CRM systems, where sales teams manage customer interactions and quote data from all channels should be stored.
Contract Drafting and Management should flow naturally from CRM to ERP, enabling seamless financial reporting.
Invoice Creation and Payment Processing are core functions of billing that should reside within the ERP or CRM system, where financial and sales data is already managed.
By positioning a third-party billing system as essential, standalone vendors have shifted what should be natural extensions of CRM and ERP into fragmented processes. This fragmentation forces businesses to build complex integrations, making it harder to achieve a seamless sales-to-finance workflow.
The Problem with Standalone Billing Systems
At Continuous, we believe the current approach taken by standalone billing vendors is fundamentally flawed. Instead of simplifying processes, these vendors create friction by placing themselves as overlapping solutions with the CRM and ERP systems they are also dependent on. This introduces costly, cumbersome integrations that are difficult to maintain—particularly as pricing and packaging models evolve.
There’s no inherent reason why traditional sales and financial processes should be managed by a separate system when sales and finance teams have already invested in systems like Salesforce and NetSuite. Standalone billing vendors want businesses to believe they must control these processes, but the reality is that doing so makes their systems “stickier” by requiring complex customizations and significant services investments. The end result for customers of these vendors are deployments that are:
Expensive to integrate: Building and maintaining integrations between CRM, ERP, and standalone billing systems often requires costly services and custom work.
Rigid and limiting: Once integrations are built, they become rigid, making it difficult for businesses to adapt to new pricing models or market changes without extensive rework.
Manual and error-prone: Despite these integrations, many billing processes still require manual intervention, leading to inefficiencies and potential errors in financial reporting and customer invoicing.
This is why the current market is so difficult for analysts to cover: the premise of a standalone billing system is inherently flawed. The criteria that Gartner and Forrester use to evaluate these vendors encompass functions that should naturally belong in core CRM and ERP systems. However, standalone vendors pull these critical processes into a third cloud, which struggles to work effectively alongside CRM or ERP solutions.
The Continuous Approach: Back to Common Sense
At Continuous, we challenge this status quo. We believe that the best way to solve the recurring billing problem is to go back to what was previously common sense: there should not be a third cloud in between CRM and ERP.
Instead, we advocate for enhancing the core applications that B2B companies already rely on—CRM for sales and ERP for finance—and supplementing them with a powerful calculation engine that integrates with customers’ internal platforms. By doing this, we enable a truly unified quote-to-consumption process that is:
Easier to maintain.
More flexible as pricing and packaging needs evolve.
Less expensive to deploy, reducing both software license and integration costs.
Conclusion: Challenging the Status Quo
The release of the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave reports highlights how deeply entrenched the idea of standalone billing systems has become. But as businesses increasingly adopt complex pricing models and usage-based billing, the limitations of these systems become more apparent.
At Continuous, we believe there’s a better way—one that embeds billing awareness directly into the tools businesses use every day, rather than introducing another layer of complexity. By rethinking how billing should work, we can simplify the process for businesses and create a more efficient, flexible future for recurring billing.
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.
If you’re ready to move beyond the limitations of standalone billing systems, let’s talk. Explore how Continuous can streamline your quote-to-cash process and help your business scale with confidence. Find out more today at: Product | Continuous Technologies.
