Why Recurring Billing in Business Central Still Falls Short for CSPs

Microsoft Business Central offers native Subscription Billing for recurring revenue, but for CSP partners, it’s only the start of the journey. Without real-time provisioning and alignment to Microsoft Partner Center, you're fighting a losing battle of mismatched seats, pricing shifts, and margin erosion. And even when billing runs smoothly inside BC, visibility doesn’t. Finance may see the numbers, but sales, operations, and provisioning teams don’t. The result? Silos, blind spots, and constant reconciliation cycles.

In this post, we’ll walk you through:

• What BC’s Subscription Billing does and doesn’t
• How Partner Center defines CSP reality
• Why “billing-only” solutions for BC inevitably leak revenue
• Where internal silos quietly destroy efficiency
• What a working architecture looks like (and the guardrails)
• What to check in your own stack

What BC’s Native Subscription Billing Offers (And Its Boundaries)

• Contracts, subscription lines, and templates for flexible billing
• Multiple billing frequencies (monthly, quarterly, annual)
• Deferrals and revenue recognition across periods
• Mid-term line changes (quantity, price, or duration)
• Usage-based billing imports linked to subscription lines
• Manual line entry to simplify onboarding

For software + services models, BC handles billing and revenue recognition well, but without automation tied to Partner Center, it’s disconnected from the real CSP lifecycle.

Related reading: Why Your Subscription Management Solution Must Be Built on Your CRM

Where CSP Reality Breaks the Model

Under the CSP New Commerce Experience (NCE), your world revolves around Partner Center: live SKUs, changing price lists, seat-level provisioning, and renewal rules. That’s where BC alone starts to struggle.

1. No built-in Partner Center link
   BC’s Subscription Billing doesn’t sync directly with Partner Center APIs (subscriptions, seat changes, pricing). Integration requires custom or third-party orchestration.
   
   
2. Monthly price list updates
   Microsoft refreshes license-based pricing monthly in Partner Center. If BC doesn’t fetch and apply these updates, invoices quickly drift.
   
   
3. Catalog complexity
   Regional SKUs, promotions, term variations — BC templates can’t mirror all commerce logic from Partner Center.
   
   
4. Mid-term seat changes
   Adds/removes in Partner Center don’t automatically update BC contracts. Manual tracking introduces billing lag.
   
   
5. Contract and renewal rules
   Cancellation windows, co-terms, and renewal dates live in Partner Center logic, not BC contract rules.
   
   
6. Reconciliation & error handling
   BC doesn’t natively reconcile invoices against Partner Center usage or pause billing for failed charges.
   
   
7. Cross-team visibility gap
   Even when billing is accurate, data lives inside BC, inaccessible to sales, operations, or customer success teams.

Ebrahim calls this the “silos of information” problem:

“Accounting sits in BC, sales somewhere else, ops somewhere else, that’s the biggest challenge.” Without a shared truth, every team builds their own shadow spreadsheet.

Bottom line: BC manages billing, but Partner Center controls commerce. Running one without the other is like trying to reconcile two different ledgers.

Why Partner Center Is the CSP Control Plane

Microsoft’s documentation makes this explicit:

• Partner Center REST APIs govern accounts, orders, and subscriptions.
• Price lists and offers refresh monthly via the Partner Center pricing workspace.
• Previews of new price lists let partners anticipate changes.
• Announcements drive operational and API updates partners must follow.

If your billing layer isn’t aligned to that cadence, your books, and your margins, will drift.

How Billing-Only BC Deployments Erode Margins (and Trust)

Here’s what really happens when Business Central runs billing in isolation from Partner Center:

1. Customer adds seats or renews early in Partner Center
   The change is real, revenue has moved, but BC never hears about it. Your billing data is already out of date.

2. You invoice from stale contract lines
   BC posts invoices based on what it knows, not what Partner Center sold. The delta might be just a few seats today, or an entire renewal next month.

3. Finance scrambles to issue manual credits and true-ups
   Each adjustment burns hours, adds noise to the ledger, and chips away at customer confidence. Teams start tracking “shadow spreadsheets” just to keep up.

4. Cash flow and margin take the hit
   Revenue recognition lags behind real activity, recurring invoices stall, and margin analysis becomes unreliable. You can’t close books cleanly because nothing matches.

5. Compliance risk creeps in
   When Microsoft updates SKUs, regional pricing, or NCE rules, unaligned billing data triggers audit exceptions and underreported revenue.

This isn’t just a finance problem, it’s an organizational one. When provisioning, sales, and billing teams operate from disconnected systems, errors multiply downstream.

The Architecture That Actually Works

A scalable CSP billing setup connects three synchronized layers:

1. Partner Center Integration
Pull live data from Partner Center APIs: subscriptions, orders, seat changes, pricing, and usage.

2. Orchestration Layer (Work 365)

• Map SKUs, currencies, and terms
• Apply Partner Center price list updates
• Handle promotions and exceptions
• Push clean contract data into BC

3. Business Central Subscription Billing
Use BC’s native engine for accounting integrity: billing cycles, deferrals, and revenue recognition; driven by Partner Center–synchronized data.

Partner Center ↔ Work 365 Orchestration Layer ↔ Business Central Subscription Billing + CRM. This architecture delivers CSP accuracy without manual reconciliation.

What Success Looks Like

“Having it in one platform isn’t the answer,” Ebrahim reminded. “Having it in the right platform is.” BC remains the accounting backbone, Work 365 is the automation brain that keeps Partner Center and BC synchronized.

See It Live at Directions EMEA

Join us at Directions EMEA 2025 (Poznań, 4–6 Nov) for a live Partner Center → Work 365 → BC demo.

See how provisioning, price updates, and subscription changes sync automatically: protecting your margins, improving cash flow, and giving your finance team confidence at close.

Book a 1:1 session with our team