In the world of telecommunications, growth is a double-edged sword. While a rising subscriber count is the ultimate goal, it often strains the very systems meant to support it. We’re joined by Dominic Jainy, an IT professional with deep expertise in architecting complex enterprise systems, to explore this challenge. Today, we’ll discuss the fundamental mismatch between traditional ERPs like Microsoft Dynamics 365 FSCM and the fluid nature of Telco subscription models. We will explore the hidden risks of fragmented, manual workarounds, the strategic power of building a unified contract framework directly within the ERP, and how this architectural shift can transform a company’s financial backbone from a simple reporting tool into a powerful engine for sustainable growth.
Traditional ERPs often assume a linear “order-to-cash” process. How does this clash with the continuous nature of Telco subscriptions, and what specific operational strains, like billing exceptions or reconciliation delays, typically appear first as a company scales? Please share an example.
That’s the core of the issue. A platform like D365 FSCM is world-class at ensuring governance and discipline for structured, predictable transactions—a purchase order becomes an invoice, which becomes recognized revenue. It’s a beautifully linear path. But Telco revenue isn’t a straight line; it’s a living, breathing thing. It’s a constant flow of contract amendments, service upgrades, mid-term downgrades, and variable usage charges. The first crack in the dam, almost without fail, is a surge in billing exceptions. Imagine a business with a few thousand subscribers. A customer suspends their service for a month. A sales rep handles it via email, and someone in finance manually adjusts the next invoice. It’s manageable. But when you have tens of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of these changes happen daily. Suddenly, finance is buried in a mountain of manual adjustments at the end of every month, trying to reconcile what was delivered with what was billed, and the financial close process grinds to a halt.
Many growing Telcos manage renewals in spreadsheets and usage calculations in separate systems. Beyond creating a fragmented architecture, what are the most critical business risks of this approach, such as revenue leakage or audit exposure? Could you walk us through a common scenario?
This fragmented approach feels like a solution in the early days, but it’s a ticking time bomb. The most critical risks are revenue leakage and a complete lack of auditability. Let’s walk through a scenario I’ve seen play out. A company tracks its contract renewals in a massive spreadsheet owned by the finance team. The sales team, incentivized to close deals, offers a client a custom discount for their first year, which is noted in the CRM. Meanwhile, a separate, homegrown system is pulling data usage from the network to calculate overage charges. When the renewal date arrives, the spreadsheet gets updated, but the custom discount from the CRM is forgotten, so the customer is billed at the standard rate. They dispute the invoice, tying up your accounts receivable team and damaging the relationship. Worse, an auditor comes in and asks for the full history of a single contract—the initial terms, the amendment, the billing changes—and you have to pull data from three different places, none of which perfectly align. You can’t prove your revenue is accurate, and that audit exposure is a massive liability.
You emphasize a “unified contract framework” as central to scaling subscription operations. What does this look like in practice within D365 FSCM, and how does it align sales, operations, and finance around a single source of truth? Please describe its key components.
A unified contract framework essentially creates a “single contract spine” directly within D365 FSCM. Instead of treating the ERP as just the final destination for numbers, you build the commercial logic into its foundation. In practice, this means that from the moment a salesperson closes a deal, a master contract record is created in the system. This single record governs everything. Its key components include the pricing rules, the specific service entitlements, the renewal conditions, and the revenue recognition schedule—all in one place. When a customer wants to add a new service, the amendment is made directly to that central contract. This instantly realigns everything: sales sees the updated agreement, operations knows which services to provision, and finance has a clear, automated path to bill correctly and recognize the revenue in compliance with IFRS 15. There are no more debates over which spreadsheet is correct; the contract within the ERP is the undisputed source of truth for the entire organization.
When subscription data is structured within the ERP, visibility can become a strategic differentiator. How does this improved insight help finance teams move from reactive reconciliation to predictive forecasting, and what metrics best illustrate this shift in performance?
This is where the finance function truly transforms. When all your subscription data is fragmented, finance spends the first week of every month looking backward, trying to piece together what happened. It’s a purely reactive, historical exercise. But when that data is structured within D365 FSCM, the system already understands the future. It knows every renewal date, every scheduled price increase, and every usage trend. Instead of just closing the books, the finance team can now generate highly accurate forecasts for deferred revenue, cash flow, and recurring revenue growth. For example, they can immediately identify customers whose usage is trending down, signaling a churn risk long before the renewal date. The best metric illustrating this shift is the reduction in the financial close cycle time—what once took days of manual reconciliation now happens much faster. Another is forecast accuracy. When your forecasts move from educated guesses to data-driven predictions, leadership can make strategic decisions with a confidence that simply wasn’t possible before.
It’s common to address growing subscription complexity by hiring more billing analysts. Why is this a fragile solution, and at what point does this manual approach typically begin to fail as subscriber volume increases? Please elaborate on the hidden costs of scaling with headcount.
Scaling with headcount is like trying to patch a leaky dam with more and more fingers. It might hold for a while, but it’s inherently fragile and unsustainable. The approach begins to fail when the volume of exceptions and changes outpaces the team’s ability to process them without errors. This isn’t a single breaking point, but a gradual decay of quality and efficiency. The hidden costs are enormous. First, knowledge becomes siloed; only one person knows how to handle a certain type of complex contract, and when they’re on vacation, everything stops. Second, the cost of errors multiplies. A small mistake repeated across hundreds of accounts becomes a significant financial liability. Finally, the cost isn’t just salaries; it’s the opportunity cost. Your brightest financial minds are spending their time on low-value, repetitive data entry and reconciliation instead of high-value analysis that could actually drive the business forward. You’re essentially paying more people to manage complexity rather than architecting the complexity out of the system.
By extending an ERP with a subscription-native foundation, its role can evolve from a back-office reporting tool to a growth catalyst. Can you describe this transformation and explain how it empowers teams beyond finance, such as sales and operations, to perform more effectively?
This evolution is profound. Traditionally, sales and operations teams see the ERP as finance’s territory—a rigid system that spits out reports and invoices. But when you embed a subscription-native layer, the ERP becomes a living, breathing part of the commercial engine. For the sales team, this means they can construct complex deals with various recurring and usage-based components and have complete confidence that the system can execute them flawlessly. There’s no more “I’ll have to check with finance.” For operations, it provides real-time visibility into every customer’s entitlements. When a customer calls for support, the team knows exactly what services they’re subscribed to, preventing disputes and improving service quality. The ERP is no longer a historical record; it becomes a forward-looking tool that aligns the entire organization around the customer contract, enabling growth to feel deliberate and controlled, not chaotic and reactive.
What is your forecast for the evolution of ERP systems as more industries beyond Telco shift toward complex, subscription-based revenue models?
I foresee a fundamental re-architecting of what we consider an “ERP.” The line between ERP, CRM, and billing platforms will continue to blur, driven by the demands of the subscription economy. We’ll move away from monolithic, process-siloed systems toward more agile, contract-centric platforms where the customer agreement—not a purchase order or an invoice—is the central data object. ERPs will have to become inherently more flexible, capable of managing continuous change as the default state, not the exception. The future leaders in the ERP space will be those who provide a core financial foundation of governance and control, but also offer the native intelligence to manage the entire quote-to-renewal lifecycle dynamically. Essentially, ERP systems must evolve from being systems of record to becoming systems of revenue intelligence, or they risk becoming obsolete.