By Chelsea Fickbohm, Ravus Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer
October 13, 2026 | 12 minute readRenewal billing errors rarely start in billing. Here is where they start, and three questions that help you find them.
I have two boys playing high school football for the Spartans in Missoula, covering running back on offense and linebacker on defense, with some moonlighting at defensive end. Watching their games, it’s pretty clear how much execution depends on everyone knowing their assignment and what their teammates are expecting.
On the field, it becomes clear pretty darn quickly when that breaks down. In business, it might not show up until the next invoice. Here’s an example: a customer agrees to a 5% annual increase. You’ve shaken hands on it, the contract is correct, and everyone feels good about the renewal. Then the invoice goes out with the standard 8% increase.
Now the phone is ringing, Support is digging into the mistake, and the customer is wondering why the agreement they just signed wasn’t honored. Internally, that renewal was marked complete. Everyone involved may have known about the negotiated increase, but the system still needed to know the play.
We agreed to 5%. So where did the 8% come from?
Working across revenue leadership and billing architecture, I understand the effort that goes into reaching an agreement and what it takes to carry those terms through the quote-to-cash process: quoting, contracts, integrations, billing, and finance. Sometimes, that second part takes more work than negotiation.
The negotiated increase may be in the contract, a CRM note, and an email that six people remember reading. But where is it recorded so billing can actually use it? And before we tell the system to apply 5%, we need to be clear about what that means. Does it apply to every product? Is it based on the customer’s current price or list price? Is it for the next renewal only, or every year?
These details are easy to skip when everyone feels like they’re on the same page. They become a lot more interesting when two teams calculate two different charges.
If someone has to dig up the agreement and update the charge manually every year, that’s a good place to improve the systems and billing architecture. Once the rule is clear, the systems should carry it through and apply it automatically, leaving people to review the situations that actually need a decision.
Did someone catch it before the customer did?
Mid-term add-ons: when a new product gets its own renewal date
Mid-term add-ons are another common example. A customer buys a product six months into an annual agreement, expecting it to renew alongside the original subscription. Instead, the quote or billing setup gives it a separate renewal date instead of co-terming it with the original subscription. Now you get to sort out the dates, figure out the charges, and confirm what the customer was promised. It sounded simple when the product was added, but it’s turned into a little project of its own.
Agreeing up front on how the products should renew together, then giving the systems the information to handle it, can save everyone that cleanup. The people making these corrections are a pretty good place to start. They know which assignments keep getting missed and what it takes to get things back on track.
Three questions worth asking as you evaluate
1. Are we all working from the same terms?
Choose a negotiated increase, price cap, discount, or renewal date and follow it from the quote and contract to the fields billing uses.
Does the information make it through, or does someone have to enter it again? If different systems show different values, how does the team decide which one is right?
Try asking the people responsible for quoting and billing to calculate the charge from the same agreement. If the answers don’t match, take a minute to work out why. That’s something to settle before asking a system to do it automatically.
2. What happens when the deal isn’t standard?
Walk through a mid-term add-on, quantity change, or pricing exception with the people who handle it.
This is often where the spreadsheets, reminder emails, and “make sure you ask so-and-so” steps come out. They may be keeping things working today, but it helps to understand which steps follow a repeatable rule and which need someone’s judgment.
That also gives commercial teams a clearer picture of what they’re asking the business to support. A little coordination before the agreement is finalized can save a lot of back-and-forth later.
3. How do we make sure we fix it for next time?
Correcting an invoice may involve Sales, RevOps, Legal, Billing, and Finance. With that many people involved, it helps to have someone responsible for getting to the cause and coordinating a lasting fix.
That might mean changing a billing rule, passing a missing field through an integration, or making sure a negotiated term is captured correctly in the first place. The goal is for the systems to handle the next renewal correctly, without someone having to catch and correct the same mistake every month.
Ask the people keeping it working
One of the things I enjoy about working across revenue and billing is getting the people who negotiated the agreement together with the people making it work. There’s usually a useful conversation waiting to happen, and often someone says, “Oh, I didn’t realize you had to do all that.”
If you take one thing from this, ask your billing team what they routinely catch before renewal invoices go out. Thank them for keeping things on track, and ask which recurring adjustment they’d be happiest to stop making.
I’d love to hear what they say, and what your team has figured out that saves everyone some work.
These are conversations we have often at Ravus in our work across CPQ, integrations, and Billing. You can reach me here or at info@ravusinc.com if you’d like to compare notes. If we end up talking about football, that works too.
Chelsea Fickbohm
