AI-Native ERP: Beyond Co-Pilots to True Revenue Intelligence

In today's rapidly evolving SaaS landscape, finance teams face unprecedented challenges around subscription billing, revenue recognition, and compliance. ASC 606 requirements continue to trip up even sophisticated organizations, while traditional ERP systems struggle to keep pace with complex pricing models and usage-based billing.

To explore these challenges and solutions, we sat down with Devon Coombs, a technical revenue expert with nearly 15 years of experience, including leadership roles at Google Cloud's AI deals desk and extensive ASC 606 implementation work with Deloitte. Devon now leads technical accounting initiatives at PCG, a boutique firm specializing in ERP implementation and finance operations for high-growth companies.

What Makes AI "Native" in ERP Systems?

Cameron: AI-native gets thrown around a lot in enterprise software. From a finance operations perspective, what does it really mean for an ERP platform?

Devon: There's a fundamental difference between truly AI-native platforms and what most vendors are doing today. Most companies are simply bolting AI co-pilots onto existing datasets or legacy ERP systems and calling it "AI-powered." That's not transformative asyou could achieve similar results by feeding your data into any available LLM.

What caught my attention about Everest was seeing their development approach: primarily accountants working on the product, using LLMs to code alongside engineers rather than having an engineering-heavy team building for accountants. When AI is built into the foundation helping with reconciliations and underlying processes from the ground up that represents the next generation of finance technology.

Taming Subscription Billing Complexity

Cameron: Order to Cash and Subscription Billing can overwhelm finance teams with tiers, usage calculations, and renewals. How should modern ERP systems address this complexity?

Devon: The most impactful thing an ERP can do is partner with organizations upfront to develop disciplined pricing playbooks and rate cards built directly into the system. What impressed me about Everest was seeing an SSP-first module as a core component like pricing doesn't get lost in spreadsheets, and you can actually measure whether your allocations are happening correctly.

It's shocking how many massive organizations still manage this in Excel or Google Sheets. The SEC has flagged this as a significant source of potential material misstatements. Having SSP analysis embedded in your ERP, with proper controls and integration with pricing and RevOps teams, creates the discipline that organizations desperately need.

Real-Time Cloud Infrastructure Cost Management

Cameron: Cloud infrastructure spending is exploding budgets. How can ERP systems provide meaningful visibility into these costs?

Devon: This is near and dear to my heart from my Google Cloud days, where I handled multi-billion dollar infrastructure deals. Here's what most people don't realize: if you're a cloud billing platform, your infrastructure spend often isn't tracked well because of the complexity with multiple SKUs, various billing cycles, credits, pricing discounts.

Having an ERP that can perform independent reconciliation and recalculation of expected costs is incredibly valuable for billing disputes and negotiations. Many enterprise teams actually maintain separate cloud infrastructure cost departments just to handle this complexity. An integrated approach eliminates that need while providing much better accuracy.

Where ASC 606 Trips Up Organizations

Cameron: How does ASC 606 typically create problems for your clients?

Devon: The biggest challenge occurs when sales and go-to-market motions drive the business, which is exactly how it should be, but create accounting landmines that are either impossible to operationalize or have significant negative impacts on margins and revenue.

For example, you might have a "balance of trade" initiative where you're selling additional services to existing customers. If you don't properly assess fair value, there could be contra-revenue impacts that completely wash out deals. I've seen this happen with major transactions.

Having a revenue-first ERP that stores contracts and terms, then standardizes processes and flags non-standard terms for deal team review, prevents these costly surprises. The key is having an audit trail that keeps your auditors comfortable with how you're supporting your conclusions.

The Path to Revenue-First Organizations

Cameron: How can companies become more "revenue-first" in their approach?

Devon: It comes down to education and realizing the enormous value at stake. Here's the reality: when you're working with auditors, you're dealing with highly paid experts, partners and national office managing directors making over a million dollars annually.

But many organizations try to compete with a $150,000 accounting manager using a second-rate ERP system. Of course you're going to have audit findings. Investing upfront in state-of-the-art systems and expertise pays for itself dramatically. I've worked on deals where I've saved companies hundreds of millions of dollars in margin or revenue and that's a 10,000X return on consulting fees.

The challenge is getting leaders comfortable making that investment before they hit a crisis point.

When to Abandon QuickBooks

Cameron: At what point should growing companies move off QuickBooks?

Devon: As soon as you complete your seed funding round and plan anything bigger than a small family business under $10 million annually. If you have IPO plans, need to raise capital, or want PE firm interest, you need to transition to a proper ERP system immediately.

Most of my clients fall into two categories: large enterprise B2B companies well past QuickBooks, or those same companies acquiring smaller businesses that are still on QuickBooks. The transition should happen before your first formal audit as waiting longer just creates more pain and risk.

How AI Transforms SSP and Variable Fee Management

Cameron: Can you explain how AI can address SSP and variable fee headaches?

Devon: There are two major challenges here. First, pricing discrepancies between your stated pricing and actual discount practices create SSP drift. You might give one special customer a 90% discount on a product line, but ASC 606 requires smoothing this out to prevent earnings manipulation.

The problem is that pricing practices change rapidly, especially as companies shift from subscription to consumption models. AI tools that recalculate SSPs quarterly instead of annually can prevent this drift and make revenue allocations significantly easier.

For variable pricing like overages, breakage, contingent payments, getting data insights is typically very manual. When everything lives in one AI-native system, you can simply ask: "How many overages have we charged by quarter? What were they related to? Which customer classes?" This creates reliable, auditable estimates instead of manual data aggregation across multiple systems.

The Competitive Advantage of Modern Finance Infrastructure

Cameron: How does this create competitive advantage?

Devon: If you can invest in AI-native ERP infrastructure and robust deals desk capabilities, you gain multiple advantages: more nimble pricing, more accurate allocations, better revenue forecasting. For public companies, this translates directly to better earnings releases and improved market sentiment.

The companies that get ahead of this will have a significant competitive advantage, especially as the accounting talent shortage continues. We're seeing CPA enrollment tick up slightly, but demand still far exceeds supply for qualified technical resources.

The Future: Automation Filling the Talent Gap

Cameron: How does automation address the talent shortage?

Devon: Not everyone can afford million-dollar CAO-level resources across their entire finance organization. I envision a future where companies partner with CAO-level experts running sophisticated AI-enabled systems one expert with great automation tools replacing multiple lower-level staff.

You still get cost savings from an organizational perspective while accessing the expertise level needed to match the talent pipeline constraints. It's the only scalable way forward given current market dynamics.

Building Audit-Ready Systems

Cameron: How should ERP systems support GAAP, SOX, and ASC 606 compliance?

Devon: The most critical factor is listening to users and having accountants involved in building the ERP and ensuring user experience and audit requirements are front and center. Everything must be auditable with easy access to information and customized reporting capabilities.

AI-native platforms have a significant advantage here: they can maintain central repositories of policies, especially technical policies, referenced to actual operational procedures. Automating potential narrative or desktop procedures related to AI reconciliations could be completely game-changing for auditor comfort.

Key Takeaways for Finance Leaders

As we wrapped up our conversation, several key themes emerged for finance leaders evaluating their current infrastructure:

Invest Early: Don't wait for a crisis. The cost of modern ERP infrastructure pays for itself many times over compared to audit findings, failed transactions, or operational inefficiencies.

Think Revenue-First: Your ERP should support and enable your go-to-market strategy, not constrain it. Revenue recognition complexity requires purpose-built solutions, not spreadsheet workarounds.

Embrace AI-Native Platforms: True AI integration, built from the foundation up, provides capabilities that bolted-on solutions simply cannot match.

Plan for Scale: Whether you're moving off QuickBooks or upgrading legacy systems, choose platforms that can grow with your business model evolution.

The future belongs to organizations that treat their finance infrastructure as a competitive advantage rather than a necessary evil. As Devon noted, "The stakes are high, I've seen IPOs fail because companies chose to invest in extra sales capacity rather than proper ERP and deals desk capabilities."

For finance leaders in SaaS and high-growth organizations, the question isn't whether to modernize your revenue recognition infrastructure, it's whether you'll do it proactively or reactively.

Let’s talk about how Everest Systems can transform your environment.

The future of ERP is here  and it’s Native AI. Let’s build it together.

Cameron Ackbury, CPA

Devon Coombs leads technical accounting initiatives at PCG, a boutique firm specializing in ERP implementation, audit preparation, and technical accounting for high-growth companies. With nearly 15 years of revenue recognition expertise, including leadership roles at Google Cloud, Devon has guided hundreds of ASC 606 implementations and multi-billion dollar transaction reviews.