Too many companies fall into the best-of-breed trap of buying and patching together separate CPQ, billing, and revenue recognition systems. On the one hand, sales ops teams are tasked with evaluating, buying, and running the CPQ system, which is responsible for creating and managing quotes. On the other, the finance team has similar responsibilities for the billing and revenue recognition systems. All of those moving parts can spell trouble for today’s forward-looking companies where scalability and growth are the name of the game.

So what are the costs of using a patched-together quote-to-revenue system? It’s a non-trivial, time-consuming, and resource-intensive process full of headaches and prone to failure. Let’s dig into the details:

Going live can take a very long time. Implementing three different complex systems and making them work together is a daunting proposition for any company. The complexities lead to long delays in going live, which hinders growth—the net result being that your business momentum suffers
Be prepared to spend a lot on software, headcount, and implementation.
1. Cost of software × 3: You’ll pay for three different systems, likely from three different vendors.
2. Implementation and custom integration: You’ll be implementing three different systems and then building custom integrations between them to make them work. It’s very expensive and time consuming.
3. Implementing workarounds: Most of these systems don’t support the dynamic deals modern SaaS companies need, so you’ll be Implementing workarounds to support them.
Maintaining duplicate product catalogs will be an ongoing headache. Implementing three different systems also means creating your product catalogs in three different systems, each with its own UI and mapping requirements. That process will undoubtedly lead to painful maintenance work just to keep the catalogs consistent.
Get ready for reconciliation issues … lots of them. Using one system to generate quotes and another to generate invoices is the root cause of never-ending reconciliation headaches. Add in the complexity of revenue recognition, and you have the perfect recipe for plenty of manual pain and confusion.
Forget about being nimble. Any changes to pricing or pricing models will take forever. Making what seems like a simple change to pricing will become painfully non-trivial, requiring coordination across three different systems. Many companies already have lockout periods where no changes are allowed to the catalog for this very reason.
You’ll struggle with unreliable metrics. Getting reliable, accurate metrics across a patched-together quote-to-revenue system is a tall ask. You’ll constantly be second guessing the accuracy of your metrics, and that’s if you can easily access them.