From Chaos to Clarity: Taming Order-to-Cash Complexity

Growing pains—all SaaS companies experience them. But achieving sustainable growth in the SaaS sector is now more challenging than ever before. To grow and retain customers, even well established players are feeling the pressure to go back to their startup roots, embracing more agile strategies like experimenting with multiple combinations of product bundles, pricing models, and contract options. But supporting this more dynamic approach to monetization—while also maintaining compliance, mitigating risk, and growing revenue—presents a major challenge: Order-to-Cash (O2C) processes get significantly more complicated. 

As we’ve spoken with SaaS leaders, we’ve noticed some recurring themes. Finance teams are wrestling with a wave of non-standard deals as sales pursues larger, more sophisticated clients. Meanwhile, Product teams are rolling out fresh bundles, new pricing models, and SKUs at record speed. Recent acquisitions and new market expansions add even more complexity. Although these are all normal signs of a growing SaaS company, they can stretch financial systems, processes, and teams to their limits. This mounting pressure on existing systems and processes has created a critical inflection point for many organizations.

In fact, 3 out of every 4 finance leaders report growing complexity in their go-to-market models, products, and pricing. Nearly as many report that they don’t have the right tech to support these changes. 

The problem is bigger than that, though. In reality, most SaaS companies are contending with multiple breakdowns and inefficiencies across their O2C processes. Efforts to introduce new pricing and packaging models are becoming stalled by the need for engineering to hard-code adjustments. Reporting errors and a lack of real-time data are slowing down accounting close and increasing risk. Revenue teams are spending hours manually inputting data into revenue systems.

With economic pressures mounting, business model complexity increasing, and growth expectations still high, optimizing the team structure, processes, and systems involved in O2C is more critical than ever. In this article, we’ll explore why engineers wind up owning O2C, why that hampers the company’s growth and creates compliance risk, and ultimately, why finance should own O2C.

When complexity and growth outpace your Order-to-Cash systems

–SaaS leaders facing O2C challenges typically encounter several critical issues:

• Inability to quickly implement new pricing models
• Difficulty maintaining accurate revenue recognition
• Increasing manual workload for finance teams
• Growing compliance and audit risks
• Delayed financial reporting and closing processes

These leaders may know something needs to change—and fast—but it’s hard to know who should lead the charge, how to get started, or what the right solution is. Each team involved has its own priorities and constraints—from quick deal cycles (sales) and accurate financial reporting (finance) to smooth system performance (IT) and feature integrations (engineering). 

For many SaaS companies, engineering becomes the default owner of O2C and this works until engineering no longer has the bandwidth to support these internal processes. However as your company grows, leaving O2C in the hands of engineering could lead to a multitude of issues with compliance, audits, revenue recognition, and ultimately, growth. 

Clearly, someone has to take the lead if any real changes are going to happen. Our take? The most qualified person for the job is a finance leader. 

Why? 

Because O2C is fundamentally a financial process that belongs in a dedicated financial system, with finance taking the lead. While engineering will invariably play a critical role, the O2C system shouldn’t be selected, built, or configured solely by an engineering team. 

Instead, streamlining O2C should be viewed and executed as a collaborative effort with finance as the quarterback. Now is the time to take a step back and evaluate what engineering should own, and what they shouldn’t. 

Let’s start by exploring some of the primary factors that lead to O2C breakdown. 

The Order-to-Cash process—critical, yet increasingly complex

The Order-to-Cash (O2C) process is how companies convert sales into bookings, billing, cash, and revenue. At a growing SaaS business, it touches almost every corner of operations—from contract management to revenue recognition. Getting it right is crucial, yet as companies diversify and expand, O2C often becomes a tangle of misalignments and manual workarounds.

Initially, many SaaS companies start with straightforward O2C workflows designed around a single product line or a single type of subscription. But complexity sets in the moment a business needs to sell in new ways—whether that means introducing usage-based pricing, entering new geographies, or layering on enterprise sales to product-led growth (PLG) strategies. Each new revenue model adds fresh requirements for billing, revenue recognition, and regional compliance, quickly amplifying the risk of internal friction.

So why is this suddenly such a common challenge? The primary reason is that revenue growth in SaaS demands multiple go-to-market (GTM) motions. As businesses scramble to blend or switch between sales-led and PLG motions, their legacy systems and organizational structures often can’t keep up.

This pace and volume of change has a very measurable impact on finance teams. More than three quarters (76%) of Finance leaders report growing complexity in their company’s go-to-market models, products, and pricing, while nearly as many (68%) say they don’t have the technology to support these growing demands.

Compounding this, customers and end users are showing an appetite for usage-based pricing, which requires continuous data flows and more sophisticated billing logic. Finally, emerging AI and generative AI (GenAI) use cases—with their unique consumption metrics—are introducing a whole new layer of monetization strategies. The result is a perfect storm of complexity, which can lead to a breakdown in O2C processes. 

How engineering ends up owning Order-to-Cash 

In the early growth stages, it’s common for engineering to own parts of the O2C process. Engineering is the lifeblood of any technology company and in many developer-centric organizations, there’s a strong “we can build it” mentality. This is especially true for engineering-led SaaS companies and PLG businesses that embed commerce into the user experience—think a “buy” button in the app or a simple credit card checkout on the website. 

However, there comes a time when the business has grown to such a point that it’s more than engineering can handle on their own, where the needs of a growing customer base and the dynamic market require them to focus on the company’s core mission. 

As a SaaS company begins to scale, a Controller is typically hired to make sure that reporting and accounting across O2C is accurate. Even then, Order-to-Cash continues to be split across different teams, and can become rife with manual workarounds and misalignments. Each team tends to operate within its own narrow remit, lacking a holistic perspective on the entire O2C lifecycle. 

This approach may work if your business model is unlikely to change over the next five years. But that’s rarely the case in a growing SaaS operation—and these early decisions can have a lasting impact on board-level financial reporting and SOX compliance.

What starts as a simple DIY approach soon becomes an ever-widening tangle of customizations that’s increasingly difficult to manage—and even harder to escape. Here are the key warning signs that your Engineering-owned Order-to-Cash process may be breaking down: 

• More accountants needed: After a new sales motion is added, the revenue accounting team is overwhelmed with manual revenue recognition and unable to scale without more team members.
• Distracted engineering teams: Instead of building core product features, engineering is bogged down by managing internal billing systems and coordinating data extracts with the finance team.
• Frustrated sales leaders: The sales team is hitting a wall with finance on deals, hearing that their discounts, bundles, and contract terms jeopardizes revenue policies and cannot be approved
• Increased audit scope: Auditors are asking for an increased audit scope (and cost) because they noticed more manual workarounds being added between order processing and revenue recognition.
• Inaccurate financial metrics: The finance team is unable to stand behind their bookings, billing, and revenue numbers and relies on significant manual adjustments every single month. 

If you recognize any of these warning signs, it’s time for a fundamental shift. Finance leaders are best equipped to streamline O2C processes, manage compliance risks, and drive scalable growth. Start by reassessing your O2C ownership and ensuring finance takes the lead in creating a seamless, efficient, and compliant system.

Actionable insights: Empowering finance to tame O2C complexity

SaaS growth inevitably brings complexity, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Order-to-Cash process. Here are some key insights as you begin to tackle O2C breakdowns within your organization: 

• Complexity in SaaS growth requires rethinking O2C: As SaaS companies diversify their revenue models and expand into new markets, their O2C processes become increasingly complex. This complexity strains multiple teams—finance, engineering, sales, and product—and underscores the need for a more unified approach.
• Engineering-led O2C can become a bottleneck: It’s common for engineering to own O2C in early-stage SaaS businesses. However, as the company scales, this model introduces risks around compliance, audits, and revenue recognition, ultimately hampering growth.
• Finance ownership of O2C is critical: Because O2C is fundamentally a financial process, finance leaders (such as the Controller or CAO) are best equipped to ensure compliance, manage audits, and align revenue strategies with broader business goals. This shift frees up engineering to focus on product innovation.
• Unified O2C systems enable agility and compliance: A consolidated O2C platform that brings together bookings, billing, and revenue is essential for real-time insights, streamlined operations, and regulatory integrity. Finance-led implementations of such systems help SaaS businesses adapt quickly to new pricing models, product lines, and market demands without compromising accuracy or speed.

Learn more about how Zuora can help you streamline your Order-to-Cash, all on one unified platform. Zuora handles the complexities of your recurring revenue business—whether you are managing subscriptions, consumption, or a variety of pricing strategies—so that you can focus on the next chapter of your growth journey.