- Analyst reports reveal a recurring billing market built around standalone billing systems
- These platforms attempt to own sales, billing, and finance workflows that already belong in CRM and ERP
- The result is fragmented data, costly integrations, and rigid architectures that slow change
- Recurring billing works best when embedded directly into systems like Salesforce and NetSuite
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. These reports reveal a deeper problem rooted in how standalone billing systems approach the recurring billing challenge. At Continuous, we believe the market has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the recurring billing problem.
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. By 2017, this new category of standalone billing systems had matured enough to receive formal analyst coverage. These vendors promised to simplify recurring billing by offering a third-party solution that could manage the billing lifecycle independently.
"Billing is not, and never should be, a standalone process" — because 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.
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:
- Quote creation and negotiation are native functions of CRM systems
- Contract management should flow naturally from CRM to ERP
- Invoice creation and payment processing are core functions that should reside within the ERP or CRM
The Problem with Standalone Billing Systems
At Continuous, 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. The end result for customers 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 to adapt to new pricing models without extensive rework
- Manual and error-prone: Despite these integrations, many billing processes still require manual intervention, leading to inefficiencies and errors in financial reporting
The Continuous Approach: Back to Common Sense
At Continuous, we challenge this status quo. We believe 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 enhance the core applications that B2B companies already rely on — CRM for sales and ERP for finance — and supplement them with a powerful calculation engine that integrates with customers' internal platforms. The result:
- Easier to maintain as pricing and packaging needs evolve
- More flexible as your business grows
- Less expensive to deploy, reducing both software license and integration costs