We’ve seen why SaaS businesses want to offer flexible deals, and why existing solutions are holding them back.
The question still to answer is, what would a successful solution look like?
Modestly, we’d say it would look like Subskribe.
The reasons go all the way down to the foundation of Subskribe’s design.
Order-Based Architecture
In a typical quote-to-revenue system, everything starts with the quote. In Subskribe, everything starts with the order. Almost like commits log in a database, orders in Subskribe record all the changes — and upcoming changes — in the financial relationship between a company and its customer. Subscriptions are simply a snapshot of the current state of the financial relationship — analogous to a database “view.”
It may sound trivial, how Subskribe combines quotes and orders into one master record stored in one data repository. But it makes all the difference. You would be shocked at the millions of dollars companies spend each year trying to integrate their quote and order objects across siloed CPQ and billing systems. Subskribe completely eliminates this cost by making the quote object identical to the order object.
Subksribe’s unitary architecture also eliminates the need for manual reconciliation. Once an order has been executed by both parties, Subskribe creates a subscription contract and our billing module takes over.
[Order (quote)] → [Order (signed)] → Creates Subscription → Billing Magic Happens
This is the part that floors CFOs when we demo Subskribe: when they experience a truly unified quoting and billing system.
True Order-Based Invoicing
Another important aspect of Subskribe’s design is that it’s both an order management system and a subscription management system. To generate invoices, our system looks at every subscription, then finds all the orders associated with it. This enables true order-based invoicing, as stipulated by ASC606, without hacking the system in any way.
Automatically Generate Combined Invoices
If a subscription is modified multiple times through an amendment order, the order lines related to each amendment show up on the invoice. However unlike some existing systems, we do not generate multiple invoices. We can do better. Subskribe combines all the invoices related to an order so that a customer is not befuddled when they receive their invoice.
Co-Terming
Subskribe also co-terms by default, so that even if a customer buys multiple products at different times of the year, they are all going to renew on the same anniversary date.
Moving further along, our Order object travels to the revenue recognition module (which we are actively building). The rev-rec module will perform order-line-based revenue recognition. This is about as compliant/purist as you can get with ASC606. Throughout this process, each module refers to the same product catalog and pricing engine, which means no duplication of data or logic.
Consumption Billing
Subskribe has native support for cutting edge consumption billing. From highly scalable APIs to support for leading usage pricing models such as drawdown, Subskribe has it all.
Conclusion
The appeal of a unified system is clear. But as we’ve seen, there is no way to automate the quote-to-revenue process for post-subscription SaaS without a clean-slate approach. You simply cannot combine multiple systems with different logic, metrics and data models into a single, consistent quote-to-revenue system.
We’re not the only ones to realize this. Incumbents claim to have created unified quote-to-revenue systems. But none have delivered on the promise because they weren’t willing (or able) to strip the quote-to-revenue process down to its bare bones.
Before Subskribe, SaaS companies had to put up with expensive customization, duplication of product catalogs and pricing engines and never-ending headaches from reconciliation issues. With Subskribe, everything that used to be hard suddenly becomes easy, and SaaS companies can finally focus on building solutions, not billing solutions.
