Case study · Jul 2024 – Apr 2025
Cloud Billing & Revenue Recognition for a multi-cloud reseller.
SuiteBilling and Advanced Revenue Management for a SaaS company reselling AWS, Azure and Google Cloud — plus their own professional and managed services — across Irish and Dutch entities. Consumption, subscriptions and projects, finally on one invoice and one revenue schedule.
1The challenge
The client resells AWS, Azure and Google Cloud infrastructure to enterprise customers, wrapped with their own professional services (architecture, migration) and managed services subscriptions (ongoing operation and optimisation). Two subsidiaries — Ireland and the Netherlands — with the same product set but different tax and reporting requirements.
Every customer arrangement is a different mix of three things on one contract: consumption-based cloud usage billed monthly in arrears (pulled from AWS/Azure/GCP APIs); fixed managed-services subscriptions recurring monthly or annually; and one-off professional-services project work billed against contract milestones.
This is the hardest billing model in SaaS. Finance was generating invoices manually in Excel. Revenue recognition was another Excel sheet, kept by a different person, that disagreed with the first one. Gross-margin reporting per customer was an annual archaeological dig. Auditors had questions.
2The approach
Use SuiteBilling for billing automation, ARM for IFRS 15 compliance, and pull the consumption data directly from the source — AWS, Azure and GCP — via native RestAPI integrations rather than relying on aggregator middleware.
Every customer contract decomposed into its three revenue streams at the point of capture — Product (cloud pass-through), Professional Services and Managed Services — each with its own recognition rule, cost-of-sale and gross-margin reporting. SuiteBilling generated the invoice; ARM generated the revenue schedule; both stayed in lockstep because they shared the same contract structure underneath.
3What was built
SuiteBilling end-to-end, ARM for IFRS 15, custom records to capture the GP-margin split, and direct RestAPI integrations to the three hyperscalers and payment providers.
Revenue streams unified
Capabilities delivered
- SuiteBilling end-to-end — recurring billing schedules for subscriptions, consumption-based rating tables for cloud usage, contract-aware invoicing combining all three revenue streams on a single invoice per customer per period, multi-currency handling (EUR for both subs with USD-denominated cloud cost pass-through) and automated dunning.
- Advanced Revenue Management (IFRS 15) — multi-element arrangements automatically splitting bundled contracts into the three revenue streams; point-in-time recognition for delivered Professional Services, ratable over the contract term for Managed Services, consumption-based for cloud pass-through. Deferred revenue visible to finance in real time, not reconstructed at month-end.
- Custom Customer, Opportunity and Agreement records — out-of-the-box NetSuite doesn't capture the gross-margin split-by-category this business needs to run. Customised the core records with SuiteScript and SuiteFlow: custom fields on Customer for cloud-vendor partner status and contract tier; Opportunity record splitting projected revenue into Product / Services / Subscription with each line's own cost and projected GP margin; Custom Agreement (Contract) record capturing per-line terms, recognition rules and billing schedule.
- RestAPI integrations to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud — direct pulls of customer consumption data from each hyperscaler, daily reconciliation against expected usage based on contract, mark-up rules per customer feeding into SuiteBilling rating tables, exception alerts for unusual consumption patterns.
- Payment automation — RestAPI integration to Stripe for card-based payments on smaller managed-services subscriptions, and to Recurly for the more complex subscription billing automation, with bank-feed reconciliation matching customer payments against open AR.
- Supporting integrations — Hubspot via Celigo for customer records flowing from marketing, Quotewerks for opportunity records and complex multi-line quoting, ServiceNow for the pre-sales technical-design process feeding into NetSuite.
- SuiteProjects roll-out — with custom project-setup, approval, resource-allocation and timesheet workflows aligned to the professional-services revenue model.
4The outcome
Audit-clean revenue recognition
ARM journals replaced the spreadsheet that nobody trusted. The annual audit completed without queries on revenue treatment.
Per-customer GP margin on demand
Gross-margin reports by customer became a dashboard rather than an annual project — finance can answer "what's our margin on X?" in seconds.
One invoice, three revenue streams
Customers receive a single, accurate invoice covering consumption, subscriptions and projects — not three reconciliation tickets.
Real-time cloud consumption
Hyperscaler usage data flows in daily, with mark-up applied per customer, exception alerts for unusual spikes, and reconciliation against contract terms.
Two subsidiaries, one process
Ireland and Netherlands run on the same SuiteBilling and ARM configuration with appropriate tax/reporting variations — not two parallel systems.
Finance closes on time
No more week-long revenue rebuilds in Excel — the month-end close runs to schedule with clean ARM journals already posted.
5Technologies used
"If your billing model is consumption plus subscriptions plus projects on the same invoice, you live with three constant problems: invoices nobody trusts, revenue recognition that fails audit, and gross-margin reporting nobody believes. Get SuiteBilling and ARM right and all three problems go away."