Salesforce Invoicing and Accounting: 4 Solutions to Compare

If you’re already using Salesforce to manage customers, sales, and service, you know its power as a front-office platform. But when it comes to accounting and invoicing, Salesforce doesn’t include a built-in general ledger or complete financial management system.

Many companies end up patching together processes and tools—sometimes for years—before realizing they need a better way to unify invoicing, accounting, and customer data.

Based on our work with hundreds of Salesforce customers, we see four main approaches:

1. Homegrown or custom-built billing systems or apps: built internally either to “make do” with what’s on hand or to create a highly customized process tailored to the business’s unique workflows.
2. Salesforce Billing: Salesforce’s billing add-on within its Revenue Cloud offering, designed to automate invoicing and payments as part of the broader quote-to-cash process.
3. External accounting software requiring integrations: QuickBooks, NetSuite, or similar, connected to Salesforce via a third-party tool.
4. Native Salesforce accounting solutions: including Accounting Seed, which lives entirely inside Salesforce from opportunity to revenue recognition.

Here’s how each option works, the challenges they solve, and where they can fall short.

1. Homegrown or custom-built systems

It’s common for Salesforce customers, especially those with in-house developers, to build a custom invoicing or billing tool on the platform. The thinking is: why not just create what we need?

Why companies start here:

• They want a process tailored exactly to their workflows.
• They see it as a way to avoid constantly buying new software—if they build a system around their unique processes upfront, they believe it will serve them indefinitely.
• They have unique billing requirements that don’t fit an off-the-shelf product.

Challenges that emerge over time:

• Billing complexity grows fast: As you layer on subscriptions, usage-based charges, or multi-entity billing, homegrown setups often can’t keep pace.
• High maintenance burden: Every bug fix, workflow change, or compliance update falls on your internal team.
• Scaling issues: As transaction volume grows or billing models become more complex (subscriptions, usage-based, multi-entity), the limitations become obvious.
• Reporting gaps: Building compliant financial reporting and audit trails from scratch is extremely difficult.
• Security risks: Without dedicated security teams and infrastructure, homegrown systems can be vulnerable to breaches and downtime. Meeting industry security standards and maintaining reliable uptime requires expertise and resources that internal teams often lack.
• Talent dependency: If the original developer leaves, future updates become risky and costly.
• Hidden costs: What feels like a money-saver upfront often ends up more expensive, between the initial build, ongoing fixes, and the maintenance load on your team.

In practice, homegrown systems are often a temporary step. They work for a small set of needs, but as the business grows, they’re replaced with a purpose-built product—usually one that integrates with Salesforce or is built directly on it.

2. External accounting software requiring integrations

The next step many companies take is connecting Salesforce to an external accounting system like QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite—not only to sync invoicing, but to integrate full accounting workflows directly into Salesforce. 

How it works: A third-party connector syncs data between Salesforce and your accounting software. For example, closing a deal in Salesforce could trigger invoice creation in QuickBooks, and payment status could sync back to Salesforce.

Why it’s appealing:

• Keeps your billing and existing accounting workflows in place.
• Gives accountants access to the tool they already know.
• Lower initial cost than replacing your accounting system.

Integration challenges to know up front:

• Connectors will break: Any time Salesforce or your accounting software updates, there’s a risk the integration stops working until it’s reconfigured.
• Sync delays cause stale data: Teams can end up making decisions on outdated information.
• Data mismatches happen: Different field formats, missing records, or sync failures can lead to inaccuracies that require manual reconciliation.
• Extra IT overhead: Someone on your team—or an outside partner—must actively monitor and maintain the integration.

For companies that rely on real-time financial visibility to make decisions, these lags and mismatches can become a major pain point.

3. Salesforce Billing 

Salesforce Billing, part of Revenue Cloud, is an add-on that generates invoices, manages subscription renewals, and handles some revenue recognition functions. It was originally built to extend Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) into the billing stage of the process.

Strengths:

• Tight CPQ integration: Perfect for complex quoting and contract changes mid-term.
• Handles recurring and usage-based billing: Can manage mid-cycle upgrades/downgrades.
• Keeps billing data in Salesforce: Reduces some of the friction compared to external systems.

Limitations:

• Works for billing, but limited for accounting: It can generate invoices and manage renewals, but it lacks a general ledger, AP, and full financial reporting.
• Often redundant: Many customers realize they don’t need it if they have a native accounting app that already handles billing.
• Enterprise fit: It’s priced and structured for companies already using CPQ with complex billing needs.

If you need complete accounting alongside billing, Salesforce Billing will require pairing with another system—which can mean more integrations to manage.

4. Native Salesforce accounting solutions

Native Salesforce accounting apps—like Accounting Seed—combine full financial management with Salesforce CRM on one platform. That means no connectors, no data syncs, no duplicate records from Sales Opportunity to Invoicing, Billing, Payments, and Reporting.

How it works: Because these apps are built entirely on the Salesforce Platform, your sales, service, and finance teams share a single database. A change made anywhere is instantly reflected everywhere.

Advantages over other options:

• Billing built-in: Recurring, usage-based, and one-off invoices flow directly from Salesforce opportunities—no need for bolt-on billing tools.
• Real-time data: No waiting for a sync to run. Invoices, payments, and reports update instantly.
• No integration maintenance: Eliminates the risk of broken connectors and sync failures.
• Single source of truth: One customer record drives both your CRM and your accounting.
• Faster decision-making: Leaders see the financial impact of customer activity as it happens.
• Customizable without code: Built on Salesforce’s declarative tools, so you can adapt workflows without expensive engineering projects.
• Automation-ready: With all your financial and customer data on the same platform, you can automate key workflows like AR and AP without custom integrations or manual intervention.
• AI-ready: Unified data sets you up to take advantage of analytics and AI without building data lakes or exporting sensitive data.

Choosing your best path forward

When evaluating Salesforce invoicing and accounting options, ask:

1. Where is your data today? If it’s split between systems, integrations will always be a factor.
2. Do you need a general ledger? Salesforce Billing alone won’t provide it.
3. How critical is real-time reporting? If you need to act on today’s numbers, sync delays will be a problem.
4. What’s your growth plan? Even modest growth often exposes the limitations of homegrown and integration-dependent approaches.

Why business move to native accounting on Salesforce

We’ve seen a clear pattern:

• Companies start with a homegrown solution or external integration because it seems faster and can fit their immediate needs.
• Over time, data delays, connector maintenance, and reporting gaps create friction.
• They move to a native Salesforce solution to eliminate those bottlenecks and future-proof their operations.

With a native app like Accounting Seed, invoicing and accounting aren’t bolted onto Salesforce—they’re part of it. That means your business runs on one system, with one set of records, and one version of the truth. If you’re ready to see how this could work for your business, learn more about how to streamline your accounting on Salesforce with Accounting Seed.