ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Billing: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.
That many enterprises have already begun or are in the process of digital modernization is a testament to the rapid rise of digital products and services, new direct online engagement
With sales models extending beyond one-time transactions, revenue is spread over the lifetime of the engagement rather than received as an upfront lump sum. This requires sustained customer engagement beyond the break-even point for a profitable business model. Such sustained engagement can also be referred to as the customer lifecycle and, in this case, the processes and people supported by technology to ensure that a provider is doing all it can to encourage the customer to engage with the seller. Often starting at the quote stage of a qualified sales engagement, the revenue lifecycle follows the buyer’s journey through contract negotiation and agreement, provisioning and fulfillment as required, invoicing, payment, contract or renewal and potential amendments to the initial order or additions in terms of new product and services.
ISG Research defines revenue lifecycle management as a unified platform that connects customer-facing teams to boost revenue and margin through consistent, long-term customer engagement. We define billing applications as those that support billing activities within the revenue lifecycle. This includes supporting multiple pricing models including subscriptions and usage; near real-time updates from plan and order amendments; individually negotiated B2B pricing; management of usage data prior to rating; integration with back office and front office systems; and analytics insights and reporting.
The quote-to-cash activity touches many internal processes, and issues are common as data and information move through the chain. A true revenue lifecycle management system manages digital documents, digitizing and storing important terms from within the document. This minimizes errors and increases transparency to those involved with the customer at every point in the lifecycle.
Digitized billing schedules and calendars can identify key events and trigger automatic activity such as renewal outreach. Digitized terms reduce input requirements as key data persists in the relevant platform data store. Analysis of repeated steps within the overall process can identify areas for improvement—for example, noting that a particular type of contract for a specific customer type requires responses from the customer’s legal counsel. In fact, all areas of the process are open to analysis if the overall process is represented within the revenue lifecycle management platform.
Analytics can help better understand the ideal or expected intervals between processes or where characteristics of a customer, region or product require alternate or additional steps. In this way, revenue lifecycle management can be continually analyzed and improved to benefit the customer experience and ultimately contribute to sustained customer engagement.
The revenue lifecycle management process has clearly defined activities spread across different departments and teams. These activities are executed across many industries and enterprises of all sizes, and have historically been performed as discrete, separate tasks. These tasks include creating and getting approval for a quote, embedding quoted terms into a contract, triggering fulfillment, invoicing for the sale and generating billing schedules that help project when revenue can be recognized. When most sales were one-time events, there was less focus on the overall customer experience as an economic imperative. For today’s enterprises, embracing more responsive pricing models such as subscription and usage requires a different approach. Sustained engagement is a necessity for profitable customers, and enterprises must pay attention to all active customer touchpoints.
Despite the business imperative, we assert that through 2026, more than one-half of enterprises will still be using manual processes to integrate quotes and contracts, leading to billing and delivery errors and poor customer experience.
In addition to the overall Revenue Lifecycle Management Buyers Guide, we published guides covering the components of revenue lifecycle management, including Billing. For many enterprises, the only post-sale contact a customer might have with a supplier is the billing event. As such, accurate, timely bills with relevant detail are a part of the overall customer experience.
Once the sale or renewal is secured, provisioning, fulfillment and billing follow. And while provisioning and fulfillment are not current concerns of revenue lifecycle management, billing is. It is an important part of the customer experience and contributes to the overall levels of satisfaction that promote strong, sustained engagement. As differences in product and service pricing models increase complexity, it is key that a successful sale or renewal leads to a timely and accurate invoice. This is critical in cases where products and services are provided by different business units. Customers do not want to manage multiple invoices, thereby making your organizational structure the buyer’s issue.
With more complex pricing comes challenges to accuracy. This is especially true of usage- or volume-tiered pricing, where the final price is determined once all relevant transactions are processed. Unlike flat-fee subscriptions, estimating a plausible bill amount is more difficult with usage transactions. Some invoices must include substantive details of how the total amount was derived, which needs to be communicated to the customer. Other transactions require billing more frequently than the common monthly cycle or continuous billing. Performance and through-processing enable enterprise billing to operate within various processing windows, improving cash flow and allowing customers to see the timely impact of changes.
Traditional ERP or billing systems developed in-house tend to revolve around singular, one-time sales models with infrequent product and service changes and relatively simple pricing models. For today’s enterprise, these legacy systems are often not agile or easily modifiable for increasingly complex business models and bundles of products and services. Not considering a billing event as part of the customer experience is a mistake. Moving billing closer to the other parts of revenue lifecycle management—notably the quote and contract processes—enables more direct billing based on the contract, order or plan. Contemporary billing systems, designed to accommodate subscription, usage and milestone (event) pricing, create billing schedules that project the billing periodically—what will be billed and when. This information is used for revenue and cash projections when combined with revenue recognition rules, which determine when the payments can be recognized under common standards such as ASC606 (IFRS 15).
Although revenue lifecycle management is a relatively new term, the need for such an approach has been around far longer. As hybrid pricing models extend into the broader economy, many existing systems enterprises use will be unable to accommodate the challenges of more complex pricing and revenue models. More importantly, in-house systems are not platforms that support rapid change and innovation. The danger is that, by not transforming processes and systems to support the revenue lifecycle of customers, there exists the potential for mistakes across teams as one group hands over to another.
Maintaining sustained engagement with customers means meeting expectations for responsiveness and accuracy. Using a current revenue lifecycle management system enables a set of prerequisites that ensure updates to business models necessary for competitiveness are not held back by process or technology. Whether you are looking for a single supplier or a series of applications that work with a core platform, this Buyers Guide will help identify providers for consideration.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Billing evaluates software providers and products in key areas that support the billing aspects of the customer’s revenue lifecycle. This Buyers Guide evaluates products based on capabilities that facilitate using an integrated and extensible platform to help orchestrate activities across sales, finance, legal and operations teams. In addition, the data and data model should be accessible using a set of standard reporting and analytic methods. The revenue lifecycle management platform supports these distinct activities with applications for billing.
This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of billing within revenue lifecycle management as we define it: Aria Systems, BillingPlatform, Certinia, Chargebee, DealHub, FastSpring, Gotransverse, Maxio, NetSuite, Oracle, Recurly, RecVue, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, SOFTRAX, Stripe, Zoho and Zuora.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of billing software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.
We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating billing offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.
The Buyers Guide for Billing in 2025 finds BillingPlatform first on the list, followed by Oracle and Zuora.
Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.
The Leaders in Product Experience are:
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:
The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.
Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle billing, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.
ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our billing blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.
You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.