The hidden costs of managing billing and revenue recognition outside your ERP

Summary (TL;DR)

• Finance teams often inherit billing systems outside their ERP and fill the gaps with spreadsheets, manual reconciliation and siloed processes. What starts as “good enough” scales into hidden costs: more headcount, slower cash flow, missed subscription revenue and higher audit risks.
• Billing outside of NetSuite means more manual work and less visibility. Subscription changes, revenue recognition and reporting become fragile, error-prone and impossible to fully automate. Finance ends up fixing mistakes instead of driving growth.
• NetSuite-native billing eliminates these challenges. With billing and revenue recognition managed directly inside the ERP, finance teams remove manual reconciliation, close faster, scale better and gain real-time visibility into cash flow and revenue.
• Want to see the full picture? Download the white paper to learn how leading finance teams structure billing for control, accuracy and scale.

Billing outside your ERP comes at a cost 

Imagine it’s the last week of the month.

Your team’s knee-deep in billing cycles, bouncing between CRM exports, spreadsheets and NetSuite. Then comes a pricing adjustment from sales that never made it into the invoice. You stop what you’re doing and start chasing it down.

Meanwhile, payments are trickling in slower than ever. DSO is creeping higher. And your CFO is asking for an updated forecast. You take a deep breath and try not to think about the audit next quarter.

That’s when you realize: you didn’t choose the billing system, but you’re the one who has to stitch things together to make it all work. 

When billing happens outside the ERP, finance often gets stuck reconciling pieces before they can do their real jobs. Data lives in too many places. Spreadsheets fill the gaps. And the more you grow, the less confidence you have in your numbers.

Disconnected processes. Manual workarounds. Lost visibility. The issues may not show up right away. But they always surface. And when they do, it's usually at the worst possible time – right when leadership is looking for answers.

In this article, we break down seven hidden cost areas that finance teams face when billing is done outside the ERP – and why bringing billing back into NetSuite changes everything.

Where the costs show up (and how to discover them)

Cost #1: The headcount trap

Have you ever analyzed how many people are involved in billing and questioned whether all that work is truly necessary?

A leading AI-enhanced people platform needed four to five people just to push billing data between Salesforce CPQ and NetSuite. But at the time, the cost wasn’t obvious. Like many finance teams, they assumed it was just “the way things worked.”

The process? Downloading CSVs. Double-checking contracts. Reformatting data manually. Uploading it into NetSuite. Then hoping nothing broke along the way.

The problem? Bottlenecks, frequent escalations and workarounds for subscription changes, proration, cross-sells and upsells that slip through the cracks. What should have been seamless turned into manual corrections and double-checking at every step. 

After integrating billing into their ERP and leveraging NetSuite-native billing automation, the company found that a single billing analyst could perform the same tasks in under two hours per day. 

Four full-time roles reduced to one. Hours of manual work – gone.

But the real win? The rest of the team could finally shift their focus from routine billing tasks to more strategic work – monitoring collection health, optimizing workflows and supporting sales with real-time insights. Finance stayed in NetSuite ERP. Sales stayed in CRM. Everyone operates in a system built for their needs.

To find out if manual processes are inflating your staffing costs, ask yourself:

• Are multiple team members touching the same billing cycle?
• How many billing tasks are still done outside ERP – in Excel or Google Sheets?
• Are cross-sells, upsells or proration adjustments still handled manually between CRM like Salesforce and ERP? How much time is that costing your team?
• Are your most skilled people spending more time moving data than managing revenue?

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Cost #2: The DSO drag

One telecommunications provider used to spend five full days every month on manual billing. Once they moved billing into their ERP and automated the whole process, that dropped to one.

That’s 48 days a year – lost to manual cycles.

But the real problem? Delayed cash.

When CRM or external billing systems aren’t fully integrated with your ERP, data gets stuck. And when billing lags, invoices sit unsent. Payments get pushed back. DSO stretches from days to weeks. That often means more corrections, more follow-up and more frustrated customers.

According to a Kaplan Group survey, delayed payments often force businesses to dip into working capital, seek short-term financing or increase reserves – just to stay liquid. 

If you've ever wondered if extended billing cycles are exposing your business to these financial risks, you’re not alone. Ask yourself:

• How many days pass between service delivery and the invoice being sent?
• Is billing ever delayed because data isn’t ready or synced between CRM and ERP?
• Are you waiting for CRM or external billing tool to push data into your ERP?

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Cost #3: The silent subscription leak

Upsells. Add-ons. Renewal changes.

They might take months to close – but they can disappear in billing in seconds.

We’ve seen finance teams trying to track mid-cycle changes on spreadsheets or relying on memory to account for upgrades and downgrades. If the CRM doesn’t sync with the ERP, it’s almost guaranteed that something gets missed.

Up to 5% of revenue. Gone.

That’s the average revenue leakage when billing isn’t automated inside your ERP. It’s more than just typos or missed dates. It’s contract terms that change in the CRM and never make it to the invoice. It’s mid-cycle adjustments that go unbilled. Renewals that slip through the cracks.

And every time a change slips through, finance is the one asked to explain why revenue didn’t match expectations.

Billing and revenue accountants get stuck doing forensic accounting just to reconcile what should have billed vs. what actually did.

If any of this sounds familiar, ask yourself:

• Is it difficult to bill for partial periods, adjustments or retroactive changes?
• Do you rely on a spreadsheet – or worse, memory – to account for every contract you update?
• Does one person own the subscription and contract change management – and does the process break if they’re out?

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Cost #4: The revenue recognition rabbit hole

How many hours does your team spend each month just trying to make rev rec work?

We’ve seen finance teams burn dozens of hours building revenue schedules by hand, translating billing data into journal entries, reconciling across disconnected CRM, CPQ and other external billing systems.

A renewable energy software company used to spend a full day every month just on building revenue schedules and aligning them with ASC 606. After moving billing into NetSuite, that dropped to just 30 minutes – a 94% efficiency gain.

But the real cost isn’t time. It’s the audit risk. When billing and revenue data live outside of your ERP, maintaining compliance with ASC 606 and achieving clean revenue recognition becomes nearly impossible. One formula error or version mismatch, and your team is spending time explaining variances you didn’t cause.

"You cannot fully automate and streamline your revenue recognition process if you use a third-party billing tool outside of NetSuite. It simply cannot be done." – James Hewitt, Senior Sales Consultant at Zone

We’ve seen that companies with fragmented billing and revenue recognition often pay 15–30% more in audit fees – not necessarily because the numbers are wrong, but because it takes longer to prove they’re right.

Would you rather spend your team’s time defending data – or closing the books and planning ahead?

If you suspect your billing process might be impacting revenue recognition, ask yourself:

• Have you ever had to restate or revise revenue numbers due to mismatched billing data?
• Are ASC 606 rules applied consistently and automatically across all your contracts and entities?
• Does your team have to rebuild revenue schedules every month in spreadsheets?
• Are you stitching together CRM, CPQ or third-party billing data with NetSuite for revenue recognition?

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Cost #5: The reporting gap

Could your CFO walk into a board meeting tomorrow with a forecast they trust?

When billing lives outside your ERP, finance usually spends more time reconciling than reporting. CRM, CPQ, billing platforms, spreadsheets, ERP – each tells a slightly different version of the truth.

Hours vanish cross-checking figures before the first reporting package is even built.

And if the numbers don’t line up? Your team hesitates. Delays. They spend days chasing down anomalies just to explain what should’ve been obvious.

We’ve seen this play out most acutely during M&A and post-investment phases – when visibility has to accelerate, not stall. And if reporting lags behind the business?

PE investors notice. Leadership asks harder questions. And finance takes the heat. 

If you suspect disconnected billing systems are impacting your reporting, ask yourself:

• Are your forecasts built on data that doesn't always line up across CRM, CPQ, billing platforms and ERP?
• Does your finance team hesitate to share numbers until they’ve triple-checked them?
• Is audit prep measured in days – or weeks – instead of hours?
• Are you manually stitching together data from multiple systems to get a full financial picture?

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Cost #6: The innovation veto

Have you ever had to say no to a new pricing idea? Not because finance couldn’t handle it – but because your billing system couldn’t.

Inflexible billing delays launches. Slows down expansion. Forces teams to build expensive workarounds or custom scripts that can’t scale. The result? Opportunity costs that never show up in your P&L – but hit just as hard.

According to a recent article from Kellogg, the more innovation adds complexity, the harder it gets to run the next experiment. In this case, the innovation isn’t what’s creating the complexity. It’s the billing process.

And when you’re manually handling exceptions every month, that’s not just inefficient – it’s unsustainable. Inflexible billing breaks the quote-to-cash flow – and finance is usually the one stuck patching it.

Is your billing system holding back innovation? Ask yourself:

• Has a pricing model ever been shot down due to CRM/CPQ and ERP system limitations?
• Have launches been delayed waiting for billing to catch up?
• Are you spending development hours just to bill for what sales is selling?
• Do manual workarounds still power your most strategic pricing ideas?

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Cost #7: The error that echoes

What happens when a customer gets an incorrect invoice?

A delayed payment? Sure. But also: a damaged relationship. And a hit to your credibility.

Every invoice carries a promise – that what you’re charging is accurate. But when billing breaks that promise, customers start to wonder: What else isn’t right?

We’ve seen that billing errors tend to increase when CRM, CPQ, third-party billing platforms and NetSuite aren’t in sync. And they often only surface when your customer flags them. Or worse – when they escalate into late payments, disputes, lost revenue or even churn.

These aren’t one-off annoyances. They’re trust fractures – ones that don’t just delay payments but chip away at your brand’s reliability.

Concerned that billing errors are eroding the trust your customers have in you? Ask yourself:

• Are you reissuing invoices regularly after customers find errors?
• Do customers routinely ask for clarification on charges they don’t understand?
• Are errors caught only during reconciliation – instead of before invoices go out?

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The real cost of doing billing outside ERP: It doesn’t stay small. It scales with you.

Most companies don’t plan to build messy billing processes. They just need to get invoices out the door – so they make it work.

A spreadsheet here. A manual reconciliation there. A billing tool that’s “fine for now.”

But patches become patterns. And those patterns become pain.

Manual tasks balloon. Billing cycles stretch. New revenue models trigger panic – not opportunity.

At some point, someone always asks: “Why are we still billing outside the ERP?” In our white paper, Where does billing belong in the modern finance tech stack?, we look at what happens when that question finally gets asked and explore:

• The operational risks finance teams face when billing outside the ERP
• How leading finance teams structure billing for control, accuracy and scale
• Why CRM-based billing often fails under complexity – and what ERP-based billing does differently
• Real examples from high-growth companies that moved billing into NetSuite (and what changed after)