Built to Scale: How SaaS Accounting Leaders Are Tackling the Challenges of Usage-Based Monetization
Usage Models Are Proliferating, And So Is the Pressure on Accounting
Usage-based pricing disrupts traditional forecasting and revenue recognition, making it essential for accounting leaders to take ownership of the quote-to-revenue process to minimize risk, enable scalability, and drive strategic growth.
As more SaaS companies embrace usage-based and hybrid pricing models, accounting leaders are finding themselves at the epicenter of change. The upside of these models is clear: better customer alignment, scalable growth, and differentiated monetization. But the operational and compliance burden they create for accounting teams is significant and growing.
If you’re a Chief Accounting Officer (CAO), Controller, or Revenue Accounting Lead in SaaS, you’re not alone. As we’ll see, leaders at companies like PagerDuty and BigCommerce have faced the same challenges and demonstrated what’s possible when accounting steps up. Controllers and revenue leaders often have a rare vantage point—overseeing the entire lifecycle of usage data, from contract setup and system provisioning to billing and revenue recognition. That end-to-end visibility makes finance one of the only teams equipped to connect the dots, uncover hidden risks, and influence how usage-based strategies are executed and scaled.
This isn’t just a tech issue—it’s a strategic leadership opportunity. Finance and accounting teams are uniquely equipped to modernize the entire order-to-cash (O2C) process. The systems. The workflows. The data.
In this article, we’ll break down the core challenges usage-based pricing creates for accounting, and the steps leading SaaS finance teams are taking to turn those challenges into a strategic advantage.
Key Takeaways for SaaS Accounting Leaders
- Usage-based pricing breaks traditional forecasting: 95% of SaaS finance leaders say usage models make revenue forecasting harder. Real-time data integration and scenario modeling are essential to regain visibility.
- Dirty usage data creates audit risk: Inconsistent or late usage data prevents accurate billing and compliance with ASC 606. Automating ingestion and building audit trails is critical.
- Manual reconciliation is still rampant: 97% of SaaS accounting leaders say their teams are stuck in spreadsheets. Workflow automation and unified O2C platforms are the way forward.
- Complex pricing strains compliance: Tiered, pooled, and volume-based models challenge ASC 606 adherence. Standardized accounting logic and early finance involvement are must-haves.
- Legacy systems block growth: 94% of leaders report rejecting non-standard deals due to O2C system constraints. Scalable infrastructure is essential to support deal innovation.
- Lack of transparency damages trust: Without clear usage visibility, customer confidence and retention suffer. Usage dashboards and billing clarity help reduce disputes and churn.
- Finance must lead the charge: Accounting teams that take ownership of the quote-to-revenue process can reduce risk, unlock scalability, and drive strategic growth in the usage era.
The Strategic Opportunity for Accounting
As a controller or revenue leader, you may be one of the few—or even the only—people with end-to-end visibility into the full lifecycle of usage data. From contract terms to system provisioning, usage events, billing, and revenue recognition, your team sees it all. That unique vantage point puts you in a powerful position to identify risks, spot revenue opportunities, and drive monetization strategy.
And yet, you’re often doing this in a tougher macro environment. B2B buyers are tightening budgets. Internal tech investments are being deferred. And SaaS companies are getting more creative than ever, rolling out multi-year ramps, usage-based pricing, and custom terms just to keep deals moving.
The result? Contracts with complex revenue recognition implications and fragmented data flowing through outdated systems leaving revenue accountants to put the pieces together. Without automation, audit trails, or time to determine the correct revenue treatment, controllers and rev rec leaders are walking a high wire with no net.
Recent data confirms this pressure. In a survey of accounting and finance leaders, 95% in SaaS said usage pricing makes revenue forecasting harder, and 97% report their current systems can’t support the complex pricing structures their business now demands.
95%
97%
100%
94%
82%
say forecasting is harder with usage pricing
confirm their systems can’t support complex pricing structures
tell us manual reconciliation is blocking strategic work
say non-standard deals are rejected due to O2C gaps
report they’re overworked due to deal complexity
Challenge 1: Unpredictable Revenue Makes Forecasting Nearly Impossible
Operating at the forefront of technological innovation and competition, SaaS companies have been early adopters of more dynamic pricing models, usage-based billing, and hybrid revenue structures, which stress-test traditional finance operations.
But how does usage-based pricing impact revenue predictability? With usage, revenue swings based on customer behavior, which can vary greatly and is often unpredictable. Additionally, managing customer expectations and ensuring value aligns with cost under a usage-based pricing model, requires a delicate dance between the customer and sales team, resulting in unpredictable billing spikes and forgiveness. Traditional forecasting models that rely on fixed subscription fees quickly begin to fall apart.
If you and your team are feeling this pain, you’re not alone. Nearly all (95%) SaaS accounting and finance leaders in Zuora’s latest survey say that forecasting is noticeably more difficult under usage-based pricing.
Maybe you and your team are spending valuable time just trying to explain variances in the actuals to forecast rather than driving strategic planning. Forecasting becomes a series of assumptions and estimates. And because you may lack real-time visibility into usage trends, you’re caught off guard by unexpected customer usage. Whether valid or in error, the lack of control over customer usage causes unpredictable dips or surges.
Steps to Solve it:
- Build cohort-based and scenario-based forecasting models. Cohorts may be by business size or industry. Analyze your customer data through many lenses.
- Create rolling 13-week forecasts tied to seasonality and usage patterns.
- Integrate real-time usage data into forecasting workflows with clearly identified, predictable data and usage data.
The Solution in Action
At Tradeweb, where transaction-based revenues can swing with market activity, the CFO hired a Head of Finance Transformation to develop forecasting capabilities that could absorb usage volatility. By integrating real-time usage data into their models, they enabled smarter planning and growth.
Challenge 2: Dirty or Missing Usage Data Creates Audit and Compliance Risk
New usage-based products and pricing configurations are often launched by product teams with little input from accounting or finance. As a result, when customers start generating usage under these unapproved structures, the accounting team is left scrambling, chasing late, missing, or inconsistent usage data. That makes accurate invoicing difficult and proper revenue recognition even harder.
The fallout? Customers receive incorrect bills. Audit risk increases. And without a clean data trail, auditors can’t reliably tie revenue back to the original usage event. No surprise that only 44% of accounting leaders say they have high confidence in their revenue data, and 65% worry about financial misstatements due to manual processes.
Steps to Solve it:
- Establish cross-functional data governance between sales, finance, product, and engineering.
- Build audit trails that trace the transaction from raw usage to billing to revenue.
- Automate ingestion and validation of usage data at the source.
The Solution in Action
Mangopay addressed this exact problem. Their CFO himself was spending days on customer calls defending usage-based charges—with no reliable audit trail. After implementing a unified billing system with built-in mediation, they eliminated data gaps and reduced revenue leakage.
Challenge 3: Manual Reconciliation Is Eating Your Team Alive
Here’s the ugly truth: legacy systems can’t automate usage billing and revenue recognition. They simply don’t have the chops. To keep things moving, you may be forced to fall back on manual workarounds: your rev rec team is stuck in spreadsheets, reconciling usage data with invoices, adjusting revenue schedules, and tracking custom pricing manually.
It’s a common problem: even with more automation and AI tools, 97% of SaaS accounting and finance leaders say their teams are still bogged down by manual O2C tasks.
This leads to late closes, increased audit risk, and demoralized teams. Worse, it pulls accountants away from strategic work that could drive business value, like identifying patterns in usage data to support more accurate forecasts.
Steps to Solve it:
- Automate usage-to-invoice reconciliation and invoice-to-revenue schedule reconciliation.
- Eliminate spreadsheets by standardizing processes and investing in workflow automation.
- Use a unified, usage-aware O2C platform where all data is visible in one system.
The Solution in Action
At Infor, accounting teams were manually reconciling usage in Excel. After adopting automated revenue systems, they stabilized cash flows and enhanced revenue predictability, all while giving their teams room to focus on strategic analysis.
Challenge 4: ASC 606 Compliance Gets Harder as Pricing Gets Smarter
Pricing model innovation and experimentation are undoubtedly a vital component of most SaaS companies’ competitive and growth-minded strategies today. But as any accountant worth their salt knows, as soon as you add in tiered, volume-based, prepaid, and pooled or minimum commitment usage models—revenue recognition can quickly become unmanageable. ASC 606 demands that you recognize revenue only when earned. That’s hard to do when pricing logic is applied inconsistently, or lives completely outside of finance systems with questionable data integrity!
Misapplied rates or inaccurate constraints can lead to revenue reversals, audit flags, and even material misstatements. Yet, it’s possible that your team may not discover all of these issues until it’s too late.
Steps to Solve it:
- Involve revenue accounting early in pricing design and data structure.
- Standardize revenue contracts and treatment for new usage models.
- Automate constraint calculations and metering or usage schedules.
The Solution in Action
At PagerDuty, the shift to usage-based pricing forced a full overhaul of their revenue recognition process. By embedding accounting logic into the system itself, they ensured compliance from day one.
If you’re dealing with changes on the billing side—usage, consumption, whatever it might be—it’s key to keep SOX and financial statements front and center. If you don’t have it right, eventually the CFO’s going to come and ask, ‘Isn’t this going to be a problem?’ and then you have to rework everything.
–Jane Koltsova
Former Senior Director of Global Revenue at PagerDuty
Challenge 5: Systems That Can’t Scale Create Deal Desk Friction
Scale and growth are great things, but that trajectory tends to bring more complex deals with usage thresholds, custom pricing, or dynamic bundles that your legacy billing and rev rec systems simply can’t handle.
This has major ripple effects for the entire business, not just accounting: 94% of SaaS finance and accounting leaders surveyed say they sometimes reject non-standard deals due to O2C constraints. 80% say approvals lead to more manual work. And 82% of finance leaders say they’re overworked due to the operational burden of revenue allocation.
Steps to Solve it:
- Work cross-functionally to standardize and educate on flexible deal structures that your systems can support. Provide guidance on how to work with accounting and finance when introducing a new structure.
- Enable finance ownership of deal desk processes through alignment of goals across the QTC process.
- Use a modern O2C platform with end-to-end support for pricing innovation, including testing and customization.
The Solution in Action
BigCommerce faced these same issues during its shift upmarket. Their CAO assembled a cross-functional team to implement a scalable O2C system that could support consumption pricing and enterprise deal structures, while also preventing finance bottlenecks.
Challenge 6: Lack of Visibility Erodes Customer Trust
Modern enterprise customers expect transparency: mid-cycle usage updates, clear invoices, and predictable bills. When customers can’t verify charges, they push back. Or worse, they churn. Customer invoice disputes spike, collections slow down, support teams escalate billing questions to finance, and ultimately, your brand takes a hit.
Steps to Solve it:
- Deliver customer-facing usage dashboards.
- Automate alerts when customers approach spending thresholds.
- Include usage explanations in contracts if agreed upon upfront and directly on invoices with actual usage.
- Connect billing, revenue, and CRM into one intelligent platform that helps you get paid, while preserving trust and forecasting with confidence.
The Solution in Action
At Mangopay, the CFO calls transparency a top priority. By giving customers real-time usage visibility, they rebuilt trust, and dramatically reduced billing disputes.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What role should accounting play in a usage-based pricing strategy?
Accounting should be at the table from the start—helping shape pricing logic, enforcing financial controls, ensuring auditability, and enabling scalable monetization strategies.
2. Why is forecasting so difficult with usage-based pricing, and how can we improve it?
Usage-based revenue fluctuates with customer behavior, making it inherently harder to predict than fixed-fee models. Additionally, the guidance in ASC 606 precludes some types of usage revenue from being recorded as deferred revenue and, therefore, is not considered forecastable for some organizations. This unpredictability complicates budgeting, revenue planning, and variance analysis. To improve forecasting, adopt rolling 13-week models, use cohort-based and scenario planning approaches, and integrate real-time usage data into your forecasting workflows to better anticipate and manage volatility.
3. How do I know if our current systems are creating audit or compliance risk with usage-based revenue?
If your team relies on spreadsheets to reconcile usage data, lacks a clear audit trail, or depends on delayed or inconsistent inputs from product systems, you may be at risk of ASC 606 compliance issues. The biggest audit red flags include inaccurate or missing usage data, manual revenue calculations, and inconsistent treatment—all of which can lead to misstatements, revenue reversals, and control deficiencies. To mitigate risk, involve accounting early in pricing design, standardize recognition logic for new usage models, and automate constraint calculations and revenue treatment directly in your systems.
4. How can I clean up our usage data and reduce manual reconciliation in revenue recognition?
Begin by establishing a shared data governance framework between finance, product, and engineering to ensure consistency and accountability. Then implement an automated, usage-aware revenue system that connects usage data, billing, and revenue recognition in a unified flow. Automating ingestion, validation, and audit trails eliminates manual reconciliation and spreadsheets, freeing your team to focus on strategic work instead of tactical cleanup.
5. What does a modern, usage-ready O2C architecture look like?
It’s a unified platform that automates usage data ingestion, pricing application, billing, revenue recognition, and compliance—allowing your team to scale operations and shift from tactical execution to strategic leadership.
The Strategic Opportunity for Finance and Accounting
As a finance or accounting leader, you’re not just responding to complexity—you’re uniquely positioned to lead the modernization of monetization. As the controller or revenue leader, you may be one of the few, or even the only, person with visibility into the full lifecycle of usage data: from contract to provisioning, to usage events, billing, and ultimately revenue recognition.
Through your month-end close reviews and analytics, you’re already uncovering insights into customer behavior. These insights are powerful, and they position you to contribute strategically. By sharing this intelligence with sales or executive leadership, you can influence pricing, packaging, and go-to-market strategy. But that requires:
- Taking ownership of the entire quote-to-revenue process.
- Collaborating across teams to define pricing, telemetry, and audit controls.
- Investing in a usage-aware O2C architecture that automates data flows, enforces compliance, and enables flexibility.
The takeaway is clear: usage-based pricing isn’t going away. It’s growing. But the companies that succeed won’t be the ones with the most creative pricing, they’ll be the ones whose finance and accounting teams can scale it, secure it, and explain it.
Accounting leaders who modernize now can reduce risk, improve compliance, and become the enablers of future revenue growth.
It’s time to lead.