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Join nowClosing deals is tough – don't let billing slow you down. Discover solutions that automate invoicing and streamline payment tracking, so you get paid faster.
By Erin Hueffner, Writer, Salesblazer
March 24, 2025
A salesperson's job is momentarily done at the end of each month when deals are closed and paperwork is submitted to the finance team. Given the effort it can take to land new customers, the worst outcome is for an unreliable order-to-cash process to create problems. This can cause significant delays in payments and cash collection, which can sour new business partnerships and create revenue leakage.
Invoice and billing software changes this. With invoice and billing software, your business can streamline processes with automated invoicing, automatic payment reminders, customizable invoices, and integrations with payment tracking software or payment gateways. This saves valuable time, improves your company's cash flow, and keeps your hard-won customers happy.
Invoice and billing software calculates charges, rates usage, applies taxes, generates and sends invoices, collects payments, and runs collections for your business. When you adopt a platform approach to invoice management software, you can automate invoicing for recurring business and build better customer relationships because your CRM and invoice management tools are connected. This becomes increasingly relevant as companies leverage sales analytics software and AI for sales to better target and accelerate sales processes.
When sales, finance, and legal are disconnected, the customer feels the pain. Learn how Revenue Cloud can help.
The following list is curated from G2 and Capterra, both of which score sales software based on user feedback, the features available, and overall satisfaction. G2 uses a five-star system focused on usability, customer satisfaction, and market presence while Capterra, which also uses a five-star system, incorporates user ratings across categories like ease of use, customer support, and value for money.
Each tool listed has a minimum rating of four stars, ensuring they are top contenders for streamlining your sales process, improving collaboration, and helping your team work smarter.
Salesforce Revenue Cloud is an end-to-end revenue lifecycle management platform that integrates the Salesforce configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution, Salesforce billing, and Salesforce subscription management for revenue management into one system. It's powered by Salesforce Customer 360. Businesses ready to scale up may consider taking a platform approach to support significant long-term growth and maturity.
How it helps sales teams:
NetSuite by Oracle is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution with comprehensive accounting, payroll, and customer relationship management (CRM) features. The NetSuite ERP module offers tools for managing financials, inventory, orders, and procurement. Capterra notes that businesses of many sizes use it, particularly small businesses.
How it helps sales teams:
Zoho Invoice by Zoho is a free, cloud-based invoicing solution geared toward freelancers, consultants, agencies, and small businesses. Its straightforward functions are centered on invoicing, expense tracking, and online payment acceptance. As businesses grow, they can upgrade to more comprehensive and paid solutions such as Zoho Books, Zoho Billing, Zoho Inventory, or the Zoho Finance Plus suite.
How it helps sales teams:
Tipalti is payment automation software that helps midsize businesses manage their accounts payable processes, including invoice processing, approval workflows, and vendor payments. Tipalti's reviews on G2 and Capterra note a user-friendly interface, streamlined accounts payable process, and responsive customer support.
How it helps sales teams:
FreshBooks is an online accounting and invoicing platform that provides invoicing, time tracking, expense tracking, report generation, and more. It's geared toward small businesses, self-employed business people, and freelancers across a variety of industries such as information tech, construction, legal, marketing, and creatives.
How it helps sales teams:
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Stripe Billing and Stripe Invoicing offer a fast and flexible way to bill customers, allowing companies to provide recurring payments globally. They support tiered pricing and metered billing, with flexible pre-built components for quick invoicing setup. Alternatively, companies can use APIs for custom integration.
How it helps sales teams:
AI/automation: Billing and invoicing happen automatically once set up, including payment notifications, customer information management, fraud detection, and more.
Xero is a global platform with a core accounting solution, payroll operations, and workforce management options. It's a comprehensive accounting solution for small businesses across a wide range of industries that includes billing, invoicing, inventory, and project tracking among other features.
How it helps sales teams:
Wave is a fast-growing accounting software designed for small businesses, particularly those in marketing, advertising, and IT. It's owned by parent company H&R Block and offers a suite of money management tools.
How it helps sales teams:
PayPal Invoicing offers an invoicing solution for small businesses to receive payments via PayPal or cards. You can create and send invoices to clients using customizable templates, set up recurring invoices, send payment reminders, and track overdue payments with no PayPal account required.
How it helps sales teams:
Square Invoices allows you to send digital estimates and customized invoices. It includes real-time invoice tracking and automatic reminders. With the Plus program, you can set up payment schedules and batch invoicing and stay organized with a project workspace.
How it helps sales teams:
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Billing software simplifies the end-to-end billing process, saving businesses time otherwise spent on manually calculating subscription and usage charges and their proration, creating and taxing invoices and sending them to customers . Automated invoice generation also leads to faster payment cycles by automating electronic payments, using AI to drive dunning and collections processes and providing automation to ensure that payments aren't missed, boosting overall cash flow..
Although the shift toward automation across various functions may feel overwhelming, it offers a competitive edge. Customers now expect easy, fast, and secure billing and payment experiences regardless of transaction size. The good news is that providing these experiences also benefits businesses. This is likely why the global e-invoicing market is expected to reach $60.9 billion by 2032, up from $13.5 billion in 2023, representing a 17.7% growth rate, according to IMARC Group.
Key benefits include the following:
More customers may seem like a good problem to have, but it can also lead to more stress — especially when managing their data across different point solutions. If you feel this pain, it's time to scale your operations by unifying billing, payments and collections for all sales channels inside your CRM system where it links directly to your customer data.
Invoice billing software tracks payments automatically so that you don't have to. You can set up automatic reminders at various intervals and interactions to prompt customers to pay their bills, Unified messaging turns collections into a team sport, reducing late payments and making the collections process more efficient.
Billing software uses encryption technologies to secure key invoice data, customer payment information, and digital transactions. It also assists with tax compliance and may include tracking features to ensure compliance with tax laws and regulations in every region you operate.
When evaluating invoice billing software, the following features should be included at a minimum:
Invoice templates simplify invoicing, but there's typically no one-size-fits-all option that works for every customer. The lack of invoicing customization in billing software reviews is flagged as a drawback across some options. If this feature is necessary for your business, your software must allow for some flexibility. You may need to customize invoicing by product, for example. Customers may have different renewal dates, billing types, or charge types.
As small businesses digitize and scale, the number of point solutions they must integrate with multiplies, from sales software to marketing automation to finance solutions. Accurate customer data leads to the best results across all your systems, so your CRM and invoice billing software need to connect with every key application you use and come with a robust ecosystem of integrated partners.
Robust analytics are crucial when considering adopting a new solution. Invoice billing software should offer customizable reports so you can focus on the metrics that matter most to your business.
Orders represent the entry way to invoice billing software, they capture transaction data from every sales channel and manage the entitlement, provisioning, and distribution processes required to deliver the goods and services to the customer and start billing. The right billing software provides high scale order ingestion capabilities coupled with order management to ensure a seamless transition into billing.
Take the time to identify what your business may need from invoice billing software, considering at least these factors:
Billing and invoicing software enhances customer experience and accelerates profitability. It also helps your internal teams collaborate across contract lifecycle management. Companies interested in Salesforce sales pricing can begin their journey toward accelerated profitability by adopting cloud-based invoice billing software.
This article is for informational purposes only. This article features products from Salesforce, which we own. We have a financial interest in their success, but all recommendations are based on our genuine belief in their value.
Header image designed by Skyword
A platform-based solution like Salesforce Revenue Cloud is ideal for connecting key business systems and moving you from CPQ to your north star: getting paid.
Billing software manages the billing process for customers purchasing products or services. It securely sends customer payment information to your payment gateway partner, allowing customers to enter their payment details online and to the payment processor, which sends customer information to financial institutions. Customer payment information is encrypted for security before being processed through the customer's bank or credit card. Once the transaction is complete, the payment status is returned to the billing software. This connectivity lets you automate invoicing, send reminders, and track payments. It also updates invoices and customer accounts in real time.
Cloud-based billing software is typically subscription-based. The cost of basic packages can vary widely and depend on the industry. For example, software custom-built for legal or medical billing may be more expensive than other versatile solutions. Many companies offer a trial subscription or, in some cases, a limited freemium version, allowing users to test the software before committing. Prices range from less than $10 per user to more than $100 per user per month.
Invoicing and billing software are not necessarily the same, though many options on the market incorporate both billing and invoicing capabilities. Billing is the process of generating a statement of charges incurred for products or services, while invoicing is a payment request made after products or services are delivered. Billing software typically incorporates invoicing, but invoicing software may refer specifically to a tool that generates invoices.
Invoicing and billing software are used by businesses of all sizes, from freelancers to enterprises. Service-based businesses that need to accept payments online can significantly benefit from invoicing solutions that easily process digital payments. Many companies have complicated billing structures, such as accounting for hourly or project-based billing, which billing software helps to manage and automate.
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