Capability will reduce revenue leakage, manual reconciliation, delayed invoicing and closes, and improve auditability and confidence

LONDON: m3ter, the usage data infrastructure leader, today announced “contract billing” to enable software providers to automatically and more accurately keep billing straight as customers adopt increasingly complex pricing contracts and as AI features proliferate.

With m3ter's new contract billing capabilities, software finance and operations teams can finally exert tight control over what was sold and how it gets billed and stop manually aligning what was agreed commercially with billing systems never meant to handle multiple contracts and terms. Instead of treating contracts as static documents that need to be interpreted downstream – which occurs today – m3ter turns contracts into structured, executable billing logic directly connected to usage, pricing, and invoicing workflows.

The result is more accurate billing, less revenue leakage, normally 4% to 7%, according to recent PwC and m3ter research, less manual reconciliation so faster month-end closes, and full auditability and confidence. Every bill is traceable back to the original contract, the underlying usage data, and the pricing logic that produced the output. This is critical for compliance, audits, and internal confidence, especially as the number of concurrent agreements per customer grows. Some m3ter customers have already reduced billing cycles by days – not hours – with contract billing.

“We’re shifting what has been a huge operational pain into a strategic advantage for software providers as they optimize usage-based pricing plans to better serve their customers and align value to pricing,” said Griffin Parry, m3ter CEO and Co-Founder. “Most billing infrastructure was built for simpler times: one product, one agreement, one billing run per customer. That no longer reflects how enterprise SaaS businesses operate. With m3ter’s contract billing, customers can operate with confidence that billing reflects reality.”

The pain points have only exacerbated with the arrival of AI. Companies are turning to usage-based pricing to adapt to the way customers consume AI features and think about value. But, the same PwC and m3ter study found almost two-thirds of U.K. software executives lack full confidence in their finance and business systems to capture customer usage data and invoice correctly, creating a risk that revenue will be lost.

Rather than just one agreement with customers, SaaS providers today have many – and they’re getting more complex. Agreements include such things as prepayments, drawdowns, commitments, overages, and tiered pricing, each with its own scope, terms, and pricing. They can also exist simultaneously. Most existing billing systems weren’t designed for this. Instead, they treat each customer as a single billing entity with a single set of rules. But a customer might have a renewal that starts before the previous term ends, a new service added mid-term under separate commercial terms, or two simultaneous contracts for the same product at different price points.

If the billing infrastructure cannot keep up, revenue leakage soars from unbilled usage and incorrect pricing or usage is attributed to the wrong agreement. Also, more manual reconciliation is required to untangle overlapping contracts. That slows invoicing, month-end closes and makes it hard for finance to really see how things were calculated.

With m3ter’s contract billing:

• Contracts become structured billing objects. Contracts defined upstream (e.g. in Salesforce) are modelled in m3ter with all terms intact, including pricing plans and rate cards, commitments, credits, and balances, and billing schedules and rules. This creates a single source of truth for how each customer should be billed across every active agreement they hold.
• Usage is automatically matched to the right contract. Usage is segmented and routed to specific contracts based on configurable attributes, filtered by dimensions on the usage record, such as a contract ID, service ID, product code, or custom identifier with include/exclude rules configured per contract. No manual sorting. No month end surprises or rework. No bespoke fixes to close a deal.
• Outputs flow automatically to ERP and beyond. Once calculated, billing data is synced to ERP for invoicing and revenue recognition, sent to CRM for sales and customer service visibility and is available for reporting, forecasting, and audit. This creates a fully connected quote-to-cash system, without requiring enterprises to replace their existing stack.

Contract Billing is now generally available to m3ter customers. For more information or to schedule a demo, contact us.

About m3ter

The m3ter platform processes usage data (metering), performs complex bill calculations (rating), and automates data flows relating to usage and billing around the quote-to-cash stack. It is principally used by enterprise software and technology customers to complement and modernize existing quote-to-cash stacks, as business models incorporate usage, or consumption-based, pricing. m3ter was founded in 2020.

Fonte: Business Wire