The Top 5 Monetization and Finance Trends of 2025
Todd McElhatton, Chief Operating & Financial Officer, Zuora
In 2025, I watched finance teams make one of the biggest shifts of the last decade. We moved from being the guardians of the numbers to the people who help the business interpret those numbers and decide where to go next. But you can’t do that without a complete picture, and that requires a single, trusted source of quote-to-cash data.
As we looked back at our customers and research from the past year, a pattern emerged: visionary leaders at fast-growing companies like Hireology, AppFolio, Asana, Cegid, and BMC Software have stepped up to become more than truth tellers; they’re embracing the role of business storytellers.
Successful finance transformations I saw this year had one thing in common: finance took ownership of the entire quote-to-cash flow, reducing manual busywork and creating more time for strategic focus. When you unify your data, automation stops being a buzzword and becomes the foundation for faster decisions, cleaner audits, and real monetization agility.
Here are the five trends that stood out in 2025 and what they mean as we head into 2026.
Trend 1: Automating away the grind to reclaim a strategic seat
In 2025, many finance teams faced an impossible equation: rising strategic demands combined with the day-to-day reality of manual work. Nearly nine in ten finance leaders reported increased pressure from the business to play a more strategic role, yet 70% said their technology stacks couldn’t support that mandate. And 79% said their teams remained bogged down by repetitive tasks. The result? Burnout, slow closes, and little time for analysis.
The winning move in 2025 was not just automating tasks but reimagining quote-to-cash with a focus on human impact.
Human resources tech leader Hireology lived this pivot. Confronted with an ERP migration and what felt like two very long months of manual close work, Controller Ryan Gruhlke knew the finance foundation had to change—and fast. What could have been just another daunting migration quickly became an opportunity for transformation.
Instead of transplanting manual rev rec processes into a new ERP, Ryan and his team completely transformed their order-to-cash process in just seven weeks, replacing manual recognition with a true automated end-to-end system. The benefits weren’t only operational (faster closes and fewer errors) but human. Accountants moved from processing to improving, gaining more time to do the more strategic work they all signed up for.
One of my team members handles everything from contract signing to collections. Automation lets her focus on meaningful projects instead of repetitive tasks. She’s spending more time improving processes and learning the system, not just always doing repetitive tasks.
— Ryan Gruhlke
Controller, Hireology
Trend 2: Consolidating quote-to-cash into one source of truth, owned by finance
Finance teams have begun to move away from patchwork billing and revenue tools toward a single, unified quote-to-cash backbone. By 2025, architecture simplicity stopped being an IT nicety and became a finance strategy, as a growing mix of new business models, global expansion, and tightening regulations made mismatched stacks untenable. Slow IT cycles only amplified the pain, resulting in inconsistent numbers, long month-end closes, and audit risk.
The big quote-to-cash trend for 2025? Finance stopped delegating the problem and owned the solution: a single, unified data model so the same number flows from quote to order to invoice to revenue.
Property management platform AppFolio’s finance team was all too familiar with the patchwork system struggle. When the company launched a new market-share campaign, already-strained processes were pushed past their limit. Bundles that had been sold as a single offer became a thicket of edge cases for billing and revenue to unwind. A single “bundle” became dozens of a-la-carte SKUs, leading to hours of manual workarounds at close. For Director of Order to Cash Priscilla Rossouw, this was the tipping point.
With years of order-to-cash expertise under her belt, Priscilla knew that the true solution to the revenue accounting team’s headaches could only be found by zooming out to look at the full scope of the problem. The answer: building clean data upstream and designing processes that worked in sync right from the start. Today, AppFolio is redesigning its quote-to-cash architecture, connecting their CPQ, billing, and revenue recognition solutions to establish one reliable source of truth.
My team loves the idea of a unified system. The ability to see, ‘This is where the number started and this is the way the number ended.’ And that number is the same throughout the system; it makes a huge difference.
— Priscilla Rossouw
Director of Order to Cash, AppFolio
Trend 3: Finance leaders became monetization architects, not pricing victims
As new pricing models exploded over the last year — AI add-ons, usage metrics, hybrid seat-plus-consumption offers, ramps and outcome pricing — many finance teams found themselves either saying “no” to sales or inventing risky manual workarounds just to keep up. That dynamic slowed launches and turned pricing into an operational liability. And worse yet, it often turned finance into the go-to-market bottleneck.
The third trend of 2025 was just as behavioral as it was organizational. More finance leaders stopped being monetization gatekeepers, and instead, became the builders. Leading teams engineered the catalog, canonical data, and quote-to-revenue flow so pricing experimentation could happen quickly and safely. Meanwhile, monetization velocity shifted from a chaotic experiment to a repeatable capability.
When work management platform Asana made the upmarket shift from pure product-led growth (PLG) to enterprise sales, it exposed a legacy billing roadblock: multi‑year ramps, blended seat‑plus‑usage pricing, and global payment needs turned each launch into a months‑long, spreadsheet‑heavy effort for finance. With a unified billing and revenue backbone, Asana now launches multiple new rate plans in weeks rather than months and has reduced audit burden by roughly 20–25%, while cleanly supporting hybrid models and complex enterprise ramps.
Pricing flexibility has become a competitive differentiator, especially in rapidly evolving markets like AI. If you’re doing pricing the old way through spreadsheets, it will take months to get to the market and you’ll be left behind.
— Sid Sanghvi
Head of Finance Business Applications, Asana
Trend 4: Making AI monetization a finance discipline, not ad hoc pricing chaos
Under pressure to stay competitive, companies in 2025 rushed AI into products and then tried to bill for it with spreadsheets and ad-hoc meters — an approach that produced billing errors, messy revenue recognition, and a whole lot of revenue leakage. Why? Monetizing AI without meter accuracy and telemetry makes it impossible to understand true economics or govern outcomes.
Over the last year, the winners have risen to the surface. Successful finance teams treated AI monetization as a discipline. They insisted on meterable events, accurate telemetry, and rule-driven flows that tie model behavior to invoices and rev-rec. Only with those guardrails could product teams safely iterate on pricing without breaking order-to-cash.
Take cloud business management leader Cegid, who literally turned billing into a monetization lab. Confronted with dozens of AI pricing choices, the company modeled 300+ pricing strategies in a controlled platform, testing invoice-based, transaction-based, usage-based, and outcome approaches. That setup let pricing, finance, and product learn quickly while preserving billing integrity and audit trails, and proved the only safe way to explore AI pricing at scale.
SaaS pricing was hard. AI pricing is even harder. But if we’ve learned anything, it’s that transformation is an opportunity—not a threat.
— Mélanie Septe
Senior Vice President of Pricing, Cegid
Trend 5: Choosing transformation partners, not just software vendors
Large transformations often fail because companies underestimate the human, process, and sequencing work required. Buying software without a partner plan can leave teams without the experience or runbooks to execute complex migrations and monetization rewires. That’s why procurement made a major shift in 2025 from feature checklists to partnership evaluation. Buyers prioritized vendors and consultancies that promised 12–24 months of engagement, finance-grade deliverables, and reference journeys showing architecture and KPI outcomes.
BMC Software’s quote-to-cash transformation, executed in partnership with PwC and Zuora, consolidated 48 disparate systems, streamlined 50+ applications, and enabled 14 autonomous quote-to-revenue capabilities. It wasn’t a software sale; it was a partner-led transformation that eliminated IT firefighting and delivered genuine monetization agility.
We knew that technology alone wasn’t going to solve this. We needed partners who had done this before, who could guide us through the human and process change.
— Ron Clegg
VP Revenue Office, BMC Software
Looking ahead: what these trends signal for 2026
If 2025 was the year finance began stepping into the role of storyteller, 2026 will be the year more of us truly own it. The companies that move fastest will be the ones where finance oversees the full quote-to-cash architecture: one source of truth, one data model, and one foundation for monetization at scale.
The leaders I speak with aren’t just responding to new pricing models or AI features anymore. When finance treats monetization as an engineered system, insight becomes clearer, decisions become faster, and growth becomes more predictable.
Learn more
If you’re thinking about rebuilding your quote-to-cash backbone or preparing your monetization strategy for what’s ahead, we can help turn these lessons into a clear, actionable path for 2026. Talk to an expert today.
FAQs
1. What are the biggest finance and monetization trends of 2025?
The top trends include automation of manual finance work, consolidation of quote-to-cash into a single system, finance-led pricing architecture, disciplined AI monetization, and the shift from software vendors to true transformation partners.
2. Why did finance teams need to rebuild quote-to-cash in 2025?
Exploding pricing models, AI-driven products, global expansion, and rising audit pressure made outdated, manual, or patchwork systems unsustainable. Companies that rebuilt achieved faster closes, reduced risk, and greater agility in monetization.
3. How did leading companies automate finance work effectively?
Winners didn’t just automate tasks; they redesigned end-to-end processes. For example, Hireology replaced manual rev-rec and close processes with a fully automated order-to-cash system in seven weeks, freeing teams for higher-value analysis.
4. What does “finance-owned monetization architecture” mean?
Instead of reacting to sales or product ideas, finance teams built unified catalogs, data models, and revenue flows that enable rapid, safe pricing experimentation. This shift turned monetization from a bottleneck into a competitive capability.
5. How should companies prepare for monetization in 2026?
Finance leaders should focus on engineering monetization systems: unified data, purpose-built quote-to-cash platforms, AI-ready pricing infrastructure, and strategic transformation partners. The goal is to make complexity repeatable, auditable, and scalable.