Contract to Cash: Top Tool Categories You Need to Know

Imagine a world where after you close new sales with clients, getting cash in your bank didn’t require so much manual effort.

As organizations grow, they need to choose the right tools to meet the demand.

Manual processes are often too expensive or error prone, harming client or customer relationships and your financial sustainability.

This guide will explore the essential categories of tools that can streamline getting from contract to cash—from all-in-one platforms to advanced integration solutions.

When scaling contract to cash workflows, it's often helpful to use software tools, which automate error-prone manual work using software.

Once you’ve decided to use a tool, however, there’s still a difficult issue: choosing one to use.

A major reason this is tough is that there are an endless number of terms tools use to describe themselves.

To address this, I share criteria to help you navigate this confusing landscape. Additionally, I will explain how different tools approach the contract-to-cash process and the major pros and cons of their approaches.

Unfortunately, there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.

In my personal experience evaluating and purchasing tools — especially if you’re testing something new — there are two important criteria to consider:

1 - Ease of Use

This criterion assesses how straightforward and intuitive the tool is for users, which promotes your and your team’s adoption.

This means you get value you’re seeking faster, enhancing your return on investment, and mitigates the risk you’re paying for a product no one is using.

It considers the learning curve, the need for technical expertise, and the overall user experience.

2 - Number of Separate Applications Needed to Achieve Your Goal

This assesses how many more applications or integrations with other tools you require to achieve your goal.

This is a strong predictor of ease of use but has other benefits too.

Tools that require fewer applications are generally more secure, often less expensive (you need to buy fewer tools), and easier to manage long-term (fewer vendors to deal with, each of whom can raise prices anytime).

There’s a catch. All in one platforms tend to not have the most comprehensive feature set for a particular function.

But comprehensiveness is often not what nimble innovators need. They need “good enough" solutions to achieve their top goal.

A major caveat

What’s best for you really depends on your organizational and personal constraints and goals.

For instance, a large public healthcare company searching for a tool will often need stringent security and privacy controls or the ability to meet a large goal set to generate sufficient purchasing support.

With the criteria above in mind, the table below shares how I see the solution categories fitting in.

Here’s also a quick summary of the tool types in the chart above. I’ll elaborate on each in the sections below.

All in One solutions do well here.

This type of solution has every component of contract to cash is natively built into one platform or system.

There are generally two types of tools here, one geared towards small and medium sized businesses and the other for larger enterprises.

Pro:
• Minimal setup or integrations with other apps to get started.

Con:
• If you’re already using a different set of tools that don’t play nice with this platform, it’ll be hard to switch.
• Innovative use cases or edge cases will also be harder to address.

SMB

Because this has all of the core contract to cash processes within one app, it’s easier to use and requires fewer apps to separately buy, onboard, and get started.

But this simplicity comes at a price — fewer “best in class” features, use cases, and versatility across a broader ecosystem of products.

What tools fit under this? A lot.

I’ll elaborate on these marketplace categories in a separate post, but they include:

• Business management solutions (e.g., Dubsado, Honeybook, Bonsai)
• Agency management systems (e.g., Productive.io)
• Finance operations platforms (e.g., Bill.com)
• Deal desk platforms (e.g., RevOps.io)
• Small business ERPs (e.g., NetSuite)

Warning: This is an incredibly noisy field with tons of solutions, labels, and inconsistent definitions.

Enterprise

These tools also have core contract to cash processes within one app — and they address the limitation above: a deeper bench of features and versatility with a broader ecosystem of products.

But because they’re focused on larger organizations and more complex workflows and use cases, they tend to be pricier and much harder to use.

The most common marketplace category is an “enterprise resource planning” (ERP) system, such as SAP, Odoo, or Zoho.

These three categories do well here:
• All in one (SMB)
• Point solution with a native integration (Any)
• Integration tools (No Code)

I’ll elaborate into the latter two because All in One was covered above.

Point solutions with native integrations

A point solution refers to a specific, targeted solution designed to address a particular problem or need within a larger system or process.

For instance, a contract management platform that integrates with an e-signature tool (e.g., Ironclad with Docusign).

These integrations are often piecemeal and exist on a case-by-case basis, requiring some setup.

If you’re not able to switch tools, you may need to start here. Find the integrations available and contact your tool’s customer support teams for assistance.

Pro:
• Often have comprehensive or “best in class” features for one particular domain
(e.g., you’re a robust legal team and want deep contract management features)
• Tend to be easier to set up and more robust than integrations you’ve generated yourself

Con:
• Harder to get your desired end to end solution, especially if you have minimal technical capabilities
• Native integrations, in particular, exist on a case-by-case by the tool itself, so there’s no guarantee the tools you want will work together.

Sidenote
Separately, this why it’s important to prioritize, specify, and validate specific people, processes, and outcomes before adopting an important tool.

That way, you don’t find yourself relying on variations of duct tape to get these systems to play nicely together or pulling your hair out if they don’t.

Integration Tools (No Code)

If there’s no native integration, you’re not out of luck.

That’s where integration tools come in. That’s where the tools below come in, helping you “duct tape” disparate apps without code, even if they weren’t designed to work together.

For instance, using a no code tool like Zapier to connect data from Monday to your payment processing tool.

These require more setup and aren’t guaranteed to work scalably or securely — but are a great way to test your workflow and get things working quickly.

These include:
• workflow automation tools (e.g., Zapier); or
• automation tools (e.g., Make)

Pro:
• highly flexible, enabling you to piece together an extensive variety of apps.

Cons:
• No guarantee they’ll work the way you want between your apps
• Often requires a connection point to have been made previously that you can use
• Unreliable security, scalability, or long-term functionality. There’s no dedicated dev team making sure these work well, as you might have for a native integration.

Integration Tools (Technical)

The below solve a similar problem but in a higher quality way (assuming you have a high quality development team).

These can take the form of:

• API integrations using code or middleware, built by your development team and assisted by an API platform (e.g., Postman)

• An Integration Platform as a System (iPaaS) such as Salesforce MuleSoft and Dell Boomi.

These provide tools and services enabling to integrate applications and data sources more quickly and efficiently, without starting from a technical blank slate.

Pro:
• Highly flexible, let’s you work with an extensive variety of apps

Cons:
• Need an expensive dev team, which requires a new set of capabilities to manage effectively
• Iterations can be costly and time consuming
• The same drawbacks associated with no-code integrations. But specific integration workflows provided by reputable iPaaS vendors are generally less affected by these issues if there are enterprise-level testing and reliability controls.

Software development

Instead of integration, you build your own custom app that solves the problem.

For instance, using a no code software platform like Appsheets to connect data that lives in google sheets or, if you have a dev team or are an engineer yourself, using code to automate the key workflows in contract to cash.

Options:
• No code software development tools (e.g., Appsheet, Flutterflow, Glidr, Softr)
• Standard software development

Pro:
• Highly tailored, build something for your specific use case or unique business logic
• Fewer data migration costs if your data is already stored in sheets or a cloud database
• Fast iteration loops (assuming you have a strong capabilities in the no code tool or in software development)
• Long term autonomy by learning how to build things yourself versus relying on third party tools

Cons:
• Very expensive, especially from a time perspective. You need to build an app (mostly) from scratch. If you’re already really busy and have an extremely full roadmap, this is going to be hard to do unless you already have strong internal technical capabilities.
• The drawbacks associated with integrations mostly also apply

My goal was provide a framework to help you navigate the confusing landscape of tools in the contract to cash tool marketplace.

In a future post, I’ll dive deeper into these categories and example use cases

Please feel free to reach out if there are critical categories I missed and share what other questions would be helpful.