Conga CPQ empowers sales, partners, and customers to efficiently configure complex products and services offerings, and provide personalized prices and quotes, utilizing codified product and pricing information - to drive higher win rates and a more pleasurable buying experience. Conga CPQ also helps to maintain a single price book, discounting structure, and quoting structure across all channels. With an API-first approach, configuration, pricing, or quoting…
$35
per month per user
Invoiced
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Invoiced in Austin offers their invoicing and AR automation platform, providing a platform for collecting online payments or presenting electronic invoices, AR analytics, and support for subscription-based business management on higher service tiers with subscription analytics (e.g. churn, pricing plan management, etc.).
It is well suited to providing quick pricing recommendations, allowing those who are quoting to get our agreements out efficiently. Where I find there may be some limitations is around the details that it uses to establish recommendations and the overrides. For example it would be nice to have a way to set overrides for those criteria like length of agreement, etc. and have it apply across the board
A 1-10 employee company with no accounting system integration needs and no customization may be suited for Invoiced. Although I wish I could, I cannot in good faith recommend any other scenario for which Invoiced is the right solution. Perhaps a subscription service that is very streamlined on autopay could work as well, but I cannot speak to that scenario directly. I do not think Invoiced can be trusted to integrate with accounting software, certainly not NetSuite, given the aforementioned reasons. There is a very high risk of system failures, connection breaks, improper code built into the core bundles, and they will blame the company for anything that is not totally standard operations. In summary, if your business does anything unique at all from a transaction lens, I would be very careful as Invoiced may promise to handle it in a Sales pitch, and then 9 months later it could still be unsolved. All the while, they are charging you even if the product is not launched, and they also will not let you terminate, because Invoiced will deny a "breach" even in the face of a directly observable example just to ride out the contract and keep all the money.
The perceived power strength is that it is supposed to contain CPQ, Contract Management, Document generation and template manipulation, and cash/invoice process all in one wrapped package.
It was developed on the Force.com platform.
They provide multiple releases of their product per year.
Our number one complaint with Conga CPQ has been speed. In my experience, Conga CPQ is extremely slow, especially for large orders.
In my opinion, the configuration methods of Conga CPQ are outdated and error-prone. One literally puts configurations into string-based custom settings, including the API field names. This often leads to deployment issues and run-time configuration errors.
In my experience, Conga CPQ is everything but simple to develop. You need things like a 12-step pricing callback to support custom pricing.
In my experience, Conga CPQ support is not responsive.
When it comes time to lock in a renewal contract for Conga CPQ, in my experience, they delay engagement, so you are truly behind the 8 ball when it comes time to decide if you are going to continue with Conga CPQ.
Communication is the #1 failure - the Invoiced contract Term starts PRE-launch on day 1, yet Invoiced had an extremely slow and encumbered way of onboarding and trying to set us up.
Core Product: In our testing, their core product broke numerous times, and if this were in a live scenario we would have been devastated. Be very careful as they don't take ownership for maintaining their integrations with all software, and things can break at any moment with updates
Systems: Invoiced rolled out updates that contained faulty code and damaged our accounting system. The lack of expertise, at least in NetSuite, is very dangerous and I recommend having in-house develops watch Invoiced's moves very carefully if you do end up trying to use them.
Lack of Ownership: We tried to terminate multiple times, only be to requested over and over that they can fix the problems. We gave them more time since we were so heavily invested from a time perspective, but they did not own the failures and we were even lied to directly by senior management in a remarkable failure to adhere to basic deadlines.
The rating is based on several things: 1) Ongoing support requirements being able to be addressed by cross training existing Salesforce administrators 2) Apttus superior corporate vision for the quote to cash space 3) Apttus execution of the corporate vision with automated agents (Max), and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning offerings to leverage the investment in Configure Price Quote 4) Apttus corporate health and investment in the product line
Conga CPQ is a great tool but lacks good support and [a] very limited knowledge base which doesn't include day to day errors which users face, thus leading us to support and take more time in turn. Also cart performance can be improved drastically which will enhance the user experience as the user doesn't have to wait for the pricing.
Tier1/tier 2 support can only handle native functionality. Customizations have to be escalated to developers which aren’t included in the support program.
I go ahead and copy the people I directly worked with on implementation for assistance. I would rate them an 8 for support assistance.
Be iterative. Take the opportunity to build a catalog based on how Apttus works well. Learn the tool yourself or use an SI. Take the time to build a configuration / pricing migration tool with X-Author for Excel or roll your own. Stick with OOTB Apttus as any customization will cost you every time a new version is released
We selected Apttus CPQ over SteelBrick due to the simplicity of SteelBrick's out of the box pricing and ability to customize quoted products. As a global organization with selling a highly configurable products, we felt the ability of Apttus to handle our requirements as standard functionalty rather than a customization was a material difference between the platforms.
We selected Invoiced primarily due to their purported high level of customizations and flexibility to handle differing business needs. That, unfortunately, became the exact reason we terminated the contract though. They have a basic framework for something that could be really great, and the potential is there, but they lack the in-house expertise and the product is far too infantile at present. Major bugs and similar issues need to be stamped out first. I can only hope they take it as a learning experience.
The ability to generate engineered configurations that is right by construction has reduced the cycle time of the customer engagement. The fact that we are able to guide the process and end up with a validated bill of material reduces the iterations with the customers.
As long as the validations rules are correct the generated bill of material is accurate. We are now looking at using Apttus to perform quality checks in our product rules since the tool is able to test different configurations quickly and efficiently.
Configuration that use to take weeks and consumed valuable engineering resources has been transformed to become a customer facing application that is simple enough for customer to self-service.
