For sales-led businesses with healthy ACV and relatively low order volume, building a subscription management system directly within Salesforce using tools like Rollup Helper can be an option. However, as your business scales and billing complexity increases, this homegrown approach often reveals its limitations, particularly around automation, integration capabilities, and the engineering resources required to maintain it.
This is where modern billing platforms like Hyperline offer a compelling alternative, especially for companies looking to automate their entire quote-to-cash process without the overhead of custom development.
The homegrown Salesforce approach: what it looks like
Structure of a custom Salesforce solution
In a custom Salesforce solution, the Opportunity Product typically becomes the source of truth. Here's how companies structure it:
The setup includes several key fields on each Opportunity Product. Fee Type indicates whether revenue is one-time or recurring, based on the Product but with override capability. Revenue Reason tracks whether the revenue represents New Business, an upsell, downsell, or renewal (with separate line items for scenarios like simultaneous downsells and renewals). Start and End Dates define when the ARR for this product instance is valid, with the end date set one day before any changes take effect to prevent double-counting. A Current ARR formula field evaluates Fee Type, product dates, and determines whether to count the Sales Price as ARR at this moment. Finally, OLI Total ARR captures the total ARR on the line item regardless of whether it's currently active.
Rollup logic and data flow
The Opportunity then rolls up key ARR and OLI data useful for sales deal reporting. These Opportunities feed into a custom Subscription object, which aggregates currently active ARR and product data from one or multiple Opportunities, maintaining a complete history of all ARR changes. Finally, the Subscription object rolls up to the Account level, displaying Current ARR (potentially from multiple subscriptions) and other product limits and entitlement data from OLIs, such as the number of active units.
When designing these rollups, it's helpful to use both real-time and scheduled nightly rollups at all levels. For nightly rollups, following the chain of rollups reduces data delays, for example, having the OLI to Opportunity rollup run an hour before the Opportunity to Subscription rollup, which runs an hour before the Subscription to Account rollup.
What this custom approach delivers
A homegrown subscription management system can provide several valuable capabilities. It enables a Finance Dashboard within Salesforce showing metrics like Current ARR against goal, future-dated committed ARR, Currently Active ARR by Product, ARR change by month by Revenue Reason (New/Upsell/Cross-sell/Downsell/Churn), NRR reporting across the install-base, and trailing 1 year ARR growth percentage.
You get Current MRR and ARR data by Salesforce Account, historical MRR and ARR change reporting by Account, and support for multiple subscriptions per Account with Account-level ARR rollup. The system updates in real-time but also corrects itself nightly via scheduled jobs. Since it's ultimately driven by Sales and Renewal Opportunity Products, your sales and renewal data become the source of truth for MRR/ARR within Salesforce. When implemented correctly, this produces high-quality data trusted for sales commission reporting.
The limitations of building your own
However, this approach has significant gaps. Companies typically don't build the guided sales workflow that CPQ systems aspire to, instead relying on documented processes in tools like Notion or Guru, with manual approvals worksheets and order templates that sellers clone and complete for each deal. Integration with accounting systems to audit and align data or bring invoice and payment data into Salesforce often remains unbuilt. Sales tax integration with quoting is another common omission, though prospects may accept disclaimers that they might be invoiced sales tax not shown on the quote.
More fundamentally, as businesses scale beyond a few hundred customers or introduce pricing complexity like usage-based billing, this manual approach becomes unsustainable. It requires significant Sales Ops headcount (often 0.5 to 2 FTEs dedicated to maintaining the system), slows down experimentation with pricing and packaging, and forces sellers through complex workflows that can hinder deal velocity.
The modern alternative: automated billing platforms
Hyperline offers an automated billing platform specifically designed for B2B SaaS businesses, supporting any pricing model, from flat fees and usage-based billing to tiers and complex enterprise contracts. The platform bi-directionally syncs customers, invoices, and subscriptions data with Salesforce, allowing teams to fully manage subscriptions directly from their CRM through an integrated widget.
Automated quote-to-cash workflow
Unlike homegrown solutions, Hyperline automates the entire quote-to-cash workflow in eight essential steps: quote generation with personalized quotations, contract signing with automated online sign-up, automatic subscription creation upon contract signing, automated invoice sending, automated email reminders for payments, automated revenue recognition aligned with accounting standards, real-time KPIs displayed directly in the platform, and integration with complementary analytics tools like ChartMogul and Fincome.
Solving operational pain at scale
According to Hyperline's founder and CEO Lucas Bédout, the platform addresses the day-to-day operational burden that becomes time-consuming once you scale beyond 200 to 300 customers, where someone must check daily that everything is correct, handling issues like incorrect pricing, missing invoice items, partial reimbursements, and failed automatic payments.
Key advantages of a dedicated billing platform
The benefits of using a specialized billing solution like Hyperline become clear when you compare it to custom development. The platform reduces time spent on billing by up to 90%, eliminating the need for external integrators, allowing teams to focus on business growth while enjoying a seamless billing process.
CRM & pricing flexibility
Hyperline's CPQ functionality integrates natively with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, getting teams started in under a minute or enabling advanced workflows with real-time two-way sync. The platform handles every pricing model, including usage-based billing, with powerful price books, custom rules, and native localization that scales across currencies, languages, and product tiers.
Payment orchestration
Rather than processing payments directly, Hyperline acts as an orchestrator, positioning itself as the interface to interact with payment processors like Stripe, GoCardless, and Airwallex. This eliminates the need to juggle between different tabs and tools.
Reporting & integrations
The platform provides advanced reporting capabilities that break down revenue by plan, product, or billing period, and automates revenue recognition to stay compliant and close the books faster. Hyperline sits at the heart of your business stack, connecting to CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot), accounting tools (Pennylane, Xero, NetSuite, QuickBooks), analytics tools (ChartMogul), operations tools (Zapier), and data stores (Segment, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Snowflake).
Making the right choice for your business
For early-stage companies with simple pricing and low transaction volumes, a custom Salesforce solution might suffice initially. However, as your business grows, introducing usage-based pricing, multiple subscription tiers, or expanding internationally, the maintenance burden and lack of automation quickly become bottlenecks.
Hyperline currently serves companies generating between €3 and €10 million in revenue and is expanding to support larger companies handling high invoice volumes. The platform's focus on automation means finance, sales, and operations teams can work efficiently without requiring dedicated technical resources to maintain billing infrastructure.
Rather than forcing sellers through complex workflows and requiring substantial Sales Ops headcount, modern billing platforms enable teams to experiment with pricing and packaging rapidly while maintaining data accuracy across all systems. The choice between building custom or buying a specialized solution ultimately depends on how you want your team to spend their time: maintaining infrastructure or driving growth.