The friction between product innovation and financial infrastructure is not new across organizations. While product teams want to launch dynamic, usage-based AI offers, finance and IT teams must wrestle with rigid billing systems that require hard-coding for every new pricing tier.
Zuora, a subscription and monetization platform, aims to bridge that gap with the launch of its Monetization Catalog, a solution launched on November 18 that reduces IT dependency by enabling business users to configure, test, and launch new pricing strategies without code changes.
Monetizing Features over Flat Rates
Traditional billing structures often struggle to keep up as companies move away from simple per-seat pricing toward complex, consumption-based models such as tokens, API calls, and compute usage.
Zuora’s release addresses these challenges, enabling monetization at the feature level by defining and tracking entitlements across plans, add-ons, and bundles, creating a foundation for usage-based or tiered feature access without custom code. For organizations launching AI copilots or data-heavy services, the catalog enables instant monetization of specific high-value features, rather than waiting for a complete SKU architecture rebuild.
“To meet the AI moment, companies need to move faster, adapt instantly, and make smarter, data-driven decisions,” said Shakir Karim, SVP of product management at Zuora.
Killing the Custom Field Workaround
One of the most significant operational shifts introduced by Zuora with this new release is the move away from static logic.
Legacy systems often forced teams to maintain hundreds of custom fields just to model real-world deals. The Monetization Catalog counters this with dynamic pricing that applies context-based rules (such as region, customer type, or channel) to automatically show the right price, without requiring cloned SKUs or manual overrides. This unified logic ensures that the rules defined at the storefront level flow seamlessly through CPQ, billing, and revenue recognition. It also eliminates the reconciliation challenges that finance teams face at quarter-end.
Karim added that with the right foundation of dynamic pricing, packaging, and buying experiences, finance teams can align how they sell with how customers make purchasing decisions.
Why this Matters Now
According to Zuora, 80% of consumers now prioritize flexibility in recurring services. The market is demanding personalized bundles and fluid pricing, yet internal teams are often too bogged down by technical debt to deliver on those expectations.
By integrating AI-ready metadata tagging, Zuora is laying the groundwork for Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact directly with pricing data in the future. This moves the industry closer to a future where pricing optimization is a real-time, data-driven reflex.
What this Means for ERP Insiders
For ERP users—particularly in finance and fintech—integrating a specialized monetization layer like Zuora’s new catalog offers specific advantages over trying to customize the core ERP to handle AI complexity. Specifically:
- The layer solves the issue of high-volume AI data. AI and consumption-based models generate massive volumes of usage data, which can bloat an ERP’s database and complicate the General Ledger. The new catalog supports usage-based pricing and rating without custom code, aggregating granular AI consumption data into a clean invoice before it is recorded in the financial records. This keeps the ERP core clean and performant while allowing product teams to iterate on complex pricing models without a custom code developer needing to restructure the billing engine.
- Zuora’s new catalog provides agility for financial services. On average, finance teams maintain hundreds of custom fields to model real-world deals. This creates a brittle audit environment for the organization. By utilizing Zuora’s new catalog’s dynamic pricing attributes, finance teams can design fee structures that help protect against downturns and adapt to market conditions instantly. For ERP insiders in banking or fintech, this allows immediate modifications to fee structures or defensive pricing strategies during market volatility, rather than months-long IT projects to update hard-coded billing logic.
- Unified logic provides faster month-end close. The reconciliation process becomes complicated during month- or quarter-end when pricing rules are scattered across storefronts, CPQ, and manual spreadsheets. Zuora’s catalog applies a unified set of rules across channels, ensuring that the rules for the customer offer match those for billing and revenue recognition. This clean financial record approach ensures that the revenue data flowing into the ERP’s financial database is pre-validated and accurate. It eliminates the reconciliation gap between what was sold and what was billed, drastically reducing the manual load on the Controller’s office during the close.
