Manage Billing Plans Without a Spreadsheet Full of Edge Cases
Your subscription tiers, add-ons, and custom deals live in a sheet that breaks every time someone adds a plan. Plan management should be a system connected to CRM and accounting, not a fragile catalogue only one person can edit.
We build the plan catalogue that keeps every subscription on the right price.
Sound Familiar?
These are the exact issues founders and subscription ops leads face when plan logic lives in a spreadsheet:
- Plan tiers, add-ons, and custom deals live in a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts
- Adding a new tier or seat pack means rewriting formulas and hoping nothing breaks
- Grandfathered pricing and expired discounts keep billing at the wrong rate for months
- CRM says Growth plus add-ons; the billing system still charges Starter
- Ops spends evenings reconciling plan changes instead of onboarding customers
Industry research puts billing leakage at 1–5% of revenue, and hybrid or usage-linked pricing often sits at the higher end. On R10 million ARR, a 3% leak is R300,000 a year that was earned but never collected, often from plan mismatches nobody notices until an audit.
What Plan Management Actually Does
Deal or upgrade lands in CRM → correct plan and add-ons apply → invoice and ledger stay aligned. No spreadsheet maths.
Plan Change Triggered
Sales closes a tier, ops adds seats, or a customer upgrades in the CRM
Catalogue Applies Rules
Tier, add-ons, discounts, and grandfathered exceptions resolve from the plan catalogue
Billing Updates
Subscription items and prorated charges update in Stripe, Chargebee, or your gateway
Ledger Stays Clean
Invoice and credit note post to Xero or Sage with the amount that was actually sold
Everything You Need for Reliable Subscription Tiers
Plan Catalogue as Source of Truth
Tiers, seat packs, add-ons, and annual discounts live in one managed catalogue. Change a price once; every new subscription picks it up without touching a spreadsheet.
Add-Ons & Custom Pricing
Extra seats, feature packs, and negotiated enterprise rates attach to the base plan with clear rules, so custom deals stop living as one-off rows in a sheet.
Grandfathered Plan Control
Legacy rates stay on the accounts that earned them, with explicit end dates. Expired discounts stop automatically instead of leaking forever.
CRM-to-Billing Alignment
When a deal closes or a plan changes in HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Salesforce, the billing plan updates to match. Contracted terms and charged amounts stay aligned.
Mid-Cycle Plan Changes
Upgrades, downgrades, and add-on swaps calculate correctly for the remaining days in the cycle. No more hand-built proration tables that fail on 31-day months.
Accounting Sync
Plan invoices, credit notes, and settlement lines post into Xero, Sage, or QuickBooks with the right VAT treatment and revenue accounts.
Platforms We've Wired for Plan Management
From 8 Hours/Week to 1 Hour/Week
How a B2B SaaS team with R8.5 million ARR stopped leaking revenue from a plan spreadsheet and recovered R340,000 in underbilling.
The Spreadsheet Catalogue
- Four public tiers, six add-ons, and 40+ custom enterprise rates in one Google Sheet
- Ops lead spent about 25 minutes per plan change, checking formulas and copying into Stripe
- Grandfathered launch discounts still applied two years after they should have ended
- CRM showed Growth plus analytics; billing still charged Starter for 11 accounts
- Finance found mismatches only at quarter-end, when credits and apologies were already due
The Managed Plan Catalogue
- Tiers and add-ons live in one catalogue; custom deals are structured overrides
- CRM plan change updates billing within minutes, with correct proration
- Grandfathered rates carry explicit end dates; expired discounts stop automatically
- Invoice amounts match contracted terms before they reach Xero
- Ops reviews exceptions instead of rebuilding every upgrade by hand
Before vs After Plan Management
How It Works
From first conversation to a live plan catalogue in 3 to 6 weeks.
Audit Your Plan Sheet
Tiers, add-ons, grandfathered rates, custom deals, and where CRM and billing already disagree.
Free Scoping Call
30-minute call to design the catalogue, edge-case rules, and which systems become the source of truth.
Build & Parallel Run
We migrate plans into a managed catalogue, wire CRM and accounting, then run one cycle alongside the spreadsheet.
Go Live & Monitor
Switch off the sheet. Monitoring flags plan mismatches and failed changes before they become revenue leakage.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from setting up a full subscription billing system?
A full billing stack covers gateways, dunning, trials, and renewals end to end. This engagement focuses on the plan catalogue itself: tiers, add-ons, custom pricing, grandfathered rates, and the edge-case logic that currently lives in a spreadsheet. If you already have Stripe, Chargebee, or PayFast collecting, we put the plan rules on solid ground and connect them to CRM and accounting.
Can we keep grandfathered customers on old pricing?
Yes. Legacy rates stay attached to the accounts that earned them, with optional end dates or review dates. New customers get current list pricing. The catalogue makes that difference explicit instead of burying it in a column only one person understands.
What happens when sales closes a custom deal?
Negotiated discounts and add-ons become structured overrides on a standard plan, not a new row copied into a sheet. CRM deal terms push into billing so the first invoice matches what was sold, and finance can see every exception in one place.
Will this disrupt our current billing cycle?
No. We migrate the catalogue and run a parallel cycle so ops can compare every plan change against the spreadsheet before switching off. Your team keeps reviewing invoices in the same tools; the fragile sheet stops being the source of truth.
Which platforms do you connect for plan management?
We regularly wire Stripe ZA, PayFast, Peach Payments, and Chargebee for the billing side, with HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Salesforce as the CRM source, and Xero, Sage, or QuickBooks for the ledger. If your stack has an API, we can usually connect it.
How much does billing plan management cost?
Focused catalogue migrations with CRM and accounting sync start from around R35,000. Setups with many grandfathered cohorts, complex add-on matrices, and multi-gateway routing typically range from R50,000 to R95,000. Most clients recovering even a fraction of plan underbilling see payback inside one to two quarters.
Stop Running Subscription Tiers From a Spreadsheet
If plan changes still mean opening a sheet, copying into Stripe, and hoping the add-ons match, you are spending money on a problem that proper plan management already solves.
Tell us how many tiers and add-ons you sell, where grandfathered deals hide, and which CRM and accounting tools you use. We will show you how a managed billing plan catalogue would work for your business.