Subscription-based services are on the rise. Software makers are transitioning from selling on-premise licenses to cloud offerings, while less tech-savvy companies are trying to monetize their digital assets with on-demand APIs. FinancialForce Inc. believes the trend is creating an opening in the revenue management space that it hopes to seize with a new managed platform called Billing Central.

The service launched today with the promise of making it easier to support subscription-based business models than general-purpose alternatives that target more traditional use cases. Like the rest of FinancialForce’s offerings, it’s built on Salesforce.com and allows users to work directly with their organizations’ customer information, which has a few major logistical benefits. The arguably most important of the bunch is that accounting teams don’t need to keep duplicate records in their systems.

As a result, Billing Central spares organizations the hassle of deploying connectors to synchronize data among their applications while mitigating the risks that arise when there are too many moving parts in a deployment. And end-users in turn gain the ability to carry out their work in a much more efficient fashion. FinancialForce says that its platform can consolidate billing across customer groups and visualize the sales lifecycle to help accounting professionals identify when a client account requires their attention. Moreover, it also provides the ability to analyze revenue data for patterns that might reveal new business opportunities.

Billing Central marks the latest addition to Salesforce.com’s vast ecosystem of third party solutions, which is one of its main advantages over the competition. But that is not to say Marc Benioff’s firm is leaving it up to partners to maintain its lead. It’s also aggressively investing in internal product development efforts that most recently yielded a pair of analytics services for marketing and financial services professionals. The company can be expected to keep churning out new features as rivals like Microsoft Corp. step up their efforts to gain ground in the  customer relationship management space.

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