Quote to Cash (Q2C) is one of the most frequently discussed topics in RevOps and GTM circles. A quick search will yield tons of posts and content about it, but usually through the lens of “buy this software” rather than “understand this process.”
Here’s the thing: even though Q2C is a critical component of any business - especially in SaaS - it’s often misunderstood. Worse, the individual components get locked behind silos and functions, creating a game of telephone between RevOps, Sales, Systems, and Finance.
The result? We far too often see breakdowns in handoffs across teams. Invoices go out wrong. Discounts don’t track. Revenue gets leaked. And billing operations - despite being critical to actually getting paid - gets dismissed as “someone else’s problem.”
In this post, I will break down some of that confusion and make Q2C a bit more accessible. Because when your teams actually understand how quoting connects to billing, which connects to cash in the door, everything runs smoother.
What Actually Is Quote to Cash?
Quote to Cash is the end-to-end process of how a deal becomes revenue in your bank account. It starts when a sales rep creates a quote for a customer and ends when that customer’s payment hits your books and gets recognized as revenue (timing, of course, depending on cash vs accrual).
Simple in concept. Messy in execution.
The reason it’s messy is that Q2C isn’t one thing - it’s a chain of connected processes that often live in different systems, managed by different teams, with different data models. When those connections break, your revenue engine sputters.
Get this wrong and you’ll spend an eternity chasing down incorrect invoices and processing refunds.
The Core Components of Q2C
Quote to Cash can be broken down into five discrete components:
Quoting (CPQ) - What products the customer is buying, at which price, and for how long
Billing - The invoice that goes out to a customer requesting payment
Payment Gateway - How customers actually pay you (credit card, ACH, wire)
Revenue Recognition - Recording revenue according to ASC 606 accounting rules
Lifecycle Management - Tracking upsells, downsells, renewals, and cancelations over time
One thing you’ll notice: I’m leaving out all of the selling operations. That’s deliberate. For clarity, we’re focusing on the happy path here - a successful deal leading to revenue. The messy stuff like lost deals, discount approvals, and commission disputes are important, but they’re part of a larger operation.
Getting Our Terms Straight
Before we dive deeper, let’s define some terms that get thrown around interchangeably but shouldn’t:
Quote - A proposal document showing what products/services you’re offering, at what price, for what term. Not binding until accepted. This is typically what the customer receives from a rep.
the quoting piece is what generates the order and ultimately determines what a customer has to pay
Order - The finalized, accepted version of a quote. This is what the customer has actually agreed to buy and what drives billing. Think of it as the contract’s shopping cart.
Contract - The legal agreement governing the relationship. Contains the order details plus all the legal terms, signatures, etc. This is typically an MSA/SOW, but in the Q2C space this is a revenue contract, legacy terms from Salesforce CPQ and ERPs. Still applicable for most professional services or physical assets, but dated under a subscription model.
Opportunity - Your CRM’s tracking record for a potential deal. Lives in Salesforce/HubSpot and represents the possibility of an order.
Termed - A subscription or contract with a defined end date (e.g., 12-month agreement ending December 31, 2025)
Evergreen - A subscription that continues indefinitely until canceled, typically on a month-to-month basis. Think of your Netflix subscription here.
These distinctions matter because your CPQ, CRM, and billing systems all treat these differently. When your rep talks about “the contract” and your billing team talks about “the order,” they might be looking at completely different things.
Quoting: Where Revenue Gets Made (Or Lost)
This is the bread and butter of the entire operation. You’ve likely heard of tools like Salesforce CPQ (formerly Steelbrick), Nue, DealHub, and Salesforce Revenue Cloud that provide quoting functionality.
The core purpose of a quoting engine should be to:
Maintain Your Product Catalog
What products you sell
How much they cost
How they’re sold together (bundles, required add-ons)
Pricing tiers and volume discounts
Generate Quotes
What products are sold to this customer
For how long (12 months, 24 months, evergreen)
Billing details (annual upfront, monthly in arrears)
Discounting and promotions
Orchestrate Approvals
Route exceptions through approval workflows
Track why discounts were given
Generate the final quote document
Report on Deal Structure
What’s being sold and at what discount
Win rates by product
Average deal size and term length
This is the piece that takes the most time to get right because you’re dealing with lots of different stakeholders and representatives. Get this wrong and you’ll spend an eternity chasing down incorrect invoices and processing refunds. Trust me, I’ve been there.
Here’s what most people miss: the quoting piece is what generates the order and ultimately determines what a customer has to pay. If it’s not on the quote, you can’t track it or invoice it. Period.
This is also where you’ll leak revenue if you don’t have insight into:
Why reps are issuing discounts
Whether promotions are being tracked correctly
If you can use the same platform for Seller Led Growth (SLG) and Product Led Growth (PLG)
And if you can’t customize your quoting quickly, you lose speed to market. Waiting for your CPQ team to build products means you delay launches or lose time on pricing experiments.
The Order: Where Quoting Meets Billing
When a quote is accepted and finalized, it should generate a finalized order that represents what the customer should receive. This order is what gets sent to your billing platform.
This is the handoff point where things often break. If you have disconnected quoting and billing systems (like Salesforce CPQ feeding into NetSuite, Stripe, or Sage Intacct), you’ll usually need to build integrations. And if your business has special structures - like usage-based pricing, multi-year deals with annual increases, or complex proration rules - those integrations can get gnarly fast.
Revenue Recognition: The Accountants’ Obsession
If you’re in the US and selling subscriptions, you’ll likely need to account for Revenue Recognition (RevRec) in accordance with FASB ASC 606. This is especially true if you’re following accrual accounting (which you are if you’re past the lemonade stand stage).
Why does this matter?
Because ASC 606 requires you to recognize revenue when you deliver the service, not when the customer pays you. This is critical in multi-term agreements where the customer pays for 12 months upfront, but you don’t deliver the service until it’s actually used each month.
Example: Customer pays you $12,000 on January 1st for an annual subscription. You can’t book all $12,000 as January revenue. You have to spread it ratably over 12 months at $1,000/month.
If you’re not in finance or accounting, this probably hasn’t crossed your radar. But it’s important to your auditors and investors, and it affects how you report growth metrics.
There’s actually a whole host of other accounting considerations that apply in Q2C - such as MEA (Multi-Entity Accounting) for companies with complex legal structures - but I don’t want to bog this down in the technical weeds.
RevRec is typically handled by your accounting software (NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Rillet), a third-party tool (RightRev), or spreadsheets (please don’t). Your billing tool doesn’t necessarily have to be the RevRec tracker since any platform that can ingest order data can typically track RevRec schedules.
Billing: The Thing You Only Notice When It’s Broken
Billing is like the CIA - you should only hear about it when something goes wrong. Unfortunately, a lot of us spend way too much time hearing about it.
A bad billing setup will set your team back in terms of productivity and customer trust. Managing refunds and credits can spiral out of control quickly, and every billing error erodes confidence in your operations.
In a perfect world, your billing engine takes the inputs from your quoting engine and generates an invoice automatically. In this perfect world, your billing engine doesn’t need translation and everything is fully in sync, reducing complexity.
The key is understanding how your quoting engine connects to your billing engine and what data is needed at each handoff.
However, far too often the order data must be sent to a third-party platform and requires customization. That customization usually involves translating order data to billing data, especially when we get to how each platform calculates things like proration.
Different systems use different proration methodologies, which causes annoying rounding errors. Speaking of rounding errors, the granularity in how each platform tracks decimal points (2 decimals vs 4 decimals) can also cause invoice discrepancies that make your finance team want to quit.
How Billing Actually Works
Your billing engine will generate invoices at a regular cadence (monthly, quarterly, annually) or as one-time invoices for professional services or setup fees. These invoices get sent to your customer and paid through whatever methods you have in place - whether that’s through your application, a customer portal, or a payment link on the invoice itself.
Some billing software - like Sage Intacct - can generate these invoices either through a contract (which drives a recurring cadence automatically) or through an order (one-time generation). Which you choose depends on your business needs and the capabilities of your billing platform.
Common billing platforms include:
NetSuite Suite Billing
Nue.io
Sage Intacct
Zuora
Chargebee
Stripe Billing
Salesforce Billing
DealHub
Payment Gateway: How Money Actually Moves
Your payment gateway is the system that processes payments from customers through a payment processor. Not rocket science, but critical infrastructure.
Payment gateways are typically platforms like Stripe, Authorize.net, or Braintree. They can usually process both credit card and ACH payments, with some handling international payment methods.
Technically, a payment gateway isn’t necessary since you can still receive payments through manual transfers, checks, or wire. But at scale, this is essential for credit card processing and overall efficiency. Plus, automated payment collection dramatically improves your cash flow and reduces Days Sales Outstanding (DSO).
The key is making sure your payment gateway integrates with your billing system so that when a payment is processed, it automatically reconciles against the invoice. Manual payment matching is a special kind of operations hell.
Lifecycle Management: Keeping Track of What Customers Have
Lifecycle Management keeps track of what the customer is entitled to and allows you to make changes over time. This could be subscriptions, physical assets (hardware), or even professional services allocations.
Ideally, your lifecycle manager allows you to:
Upsell - Add products or increase quantity mid-term
Downsell - Remove products or decrease quantity
Renew - Extend the contract for another term
Cancel - Terminate the subscription
Track assets - Monitor physical devices or license keys
This tracking makes customer support’s lives easier and allows you to provide automated provisioning/deprovisioning of entitlements to your application. Your customers receive access to exactly what they pay for - no more, no less - while reducing manual work for your operations teams.
Good lifecycle management also feeds your revenue forecasting. If you can’t see what’s up for renewal in Q4, you can’t build an accurate plan.
How It All Connects: The Q2C Flow
Here’s how these pieces fit together in practice:
Rep creates quote in CPQ with products, pricing, terms
Quote gets approved through workflow (if discounts exceed thresholds)
Customer accepts quote → becomes an Order
Order flows to billing system (either natively or through integration)
Billing system generates invoice according to billing frequency
Invoice sent to customer with payment link
Customer pays through payment gateway
Payment reconciles against invoice in billing system
Revenue recognition schedule spreads revenue over delivery period
Lifecycle manager tracks the subscription for future changes
When this flow works smoothly, it’s beautiful. When it breaks at any handoff point, you get chaos: duplicate invoices, missing payments, revenue leakage, and angry customers.
Choosing Your Q2C Stack
The bottom line is that there are multiple ways to manage your Q2C process. The right approach depends on:
Complexity of your business - Usage-based pricing? Multi-entity? International?
Reporting requirements - What does your CFO need to see?
In-house knowledge - Do you have Salesforce admins? NetSuite consultants?
Platforms you already have - Sometimes the best tool is the one you already own
The key is understanding how your quoting engine connects to your billing engine and what data is needed at each handoff. These don’t have to be the same platform, but when you have a unified data model (like Nue, where quoting and billing share the same database), the entire process is more reliable and requires less maintenance.
Unified platforms (Nue, Zuora, Chargebee) give you tight integration but may lack flexibility in one area or another.
Hub and Spoke Stacks (Salesforce CPQ + NetSuite, DealHub + Intacct) give you powerful individual tools but require integration work and ongoing maintenance. Often causing more maintenance work.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach. The right answer depends on your specific business model, team capabilities, and growth stage.
What’s Next
Understanding Q2C is the first step. Implementing it well is the hard part. If your team is struggling with:
Revenue leakage from incorrect invoices
Manual processes that don’t scale
Disconnected systems that require constant reconciliation
Lack of visibility into what’s actually been sold
Right Sized Tech can help shepherd your team through the process and determine what’s best for your business. We’ve implemented Q2C stacks for companies from seed stage to Series C and beyond.
Because at the end of the day, Quote to Cash isn’t about software - it’s about getting paid accurately for what you sell. Everything else is just details.
Related Reading:
How to Choose Between Unified and Best-of-Breed Q2C Stacks [coming soon]
Common Revenue Leakage Points in SaaS Billing [coming soon]
CPQ Implementation Checklist for RevOps Teams [coming soon]