From Contract to Invoice on a Single Platform: in Operational Leasing and Subscriptions, Your Margin is in the Billing

A single photocopier’s invoice is already a small pile of line items. Multiply that across thousands of machines and hundreds of contracts, each priced its own way, and the spreadsheet you have been relying on quietly starts to leak. That was the heart of our June 17 webinar.

Webinar recording: Pargesoft CEO Kaan Altunterim on operational leasing and subscription management.

Ask anyone who runs a photocopier rental business and they will tell you the monthly fee is the easy part. The hard part is the meter. How many pages came out, A4 or A3, color or black-and-white, how much toner and paper went with them. Even one machine’s invoice is a stack of small charges. Now scale that to a few thousand devices and a few hundred contracts, each with its own pricing quirks, and doing it by hand stops being practical.

That is the conversation we had in our recent webinar, where our CEO Kaan Altunterim walked through why the journey from contract to invoice really belongs on one platform. This article picks up where the session left off, with the same examples we showed on screen.

Recurring revenue is no longer just a software story

When people hear “subscription,” they usually think of software and streaming. But the need for recurring billing reaches much further than that. A fixed monthly fee, a fixed fee plus usage-based extras, or pure consumption-based charging: today these are the common thread running through businesses that otherwise have nothing in common.

The examples we shared make the point. Long-term car leasing, cylinder and tank rental, coffee and tea vending machines, photocopiers, forklifts, even laboratory equipment. In IT the shift happened long ago; servers, laptops and software licenses are leased or consumed as cloud subscriptions rather than bought outright. Renting instead of buying eases the financials for both sides, which is exactly why the traditional sales model keeps giving way to subscription and Equipment-as-a-Service arrangements across one sub-sector after another.

The scale is real, too. According to TOKKDER, Turkey’s car rental and mobility association, the operational car leasing sector alone reached an active portfolio of about ₺314.7 billion at the end of 2025, with roughly 234,000 vehicles on the road. And that is only the automotive side; add photocopiers, industrial equipment and the rest of the leasing world, and the picture grows considerably.

The appeal of the model is obvious: predictable, steady cash flow, growth from existing customers, a clear read on customer lifetime value. The catch sits on the other side of the ledger.

The trouble starts when contracts multiply

Take car leasing. You sign a 24, 36 or 48-month contract. Issuing equal monthly invoices is the simple part. But when a contract starts in the middle of a month, you have to prorate that first period, then bill the leftover days when it ends, then account for whether the month has 30 or 31 days, and treat February differently again. Add traffic fines passed through to the right vehicle, insurance, tire storage, bridge and motorway tolls, and the “simple” car-leasing invoice turns out to be anything but.

For a handful of vehicles you can manage this by hand. For a few thousand, reconciling all of it on both the revenue and the cost side simply isn’t feasible. Shopping-mall leasing is even thornier: our own experience shows that store rental contracts in Turkey come in more than a hundred variations. Fixed rent is rarely the whole story; it is usually a base plus a percentage of turnover, a turnover-based figure with a floor and a ceiling, or turnover alone. Photocopiers, once you factor in paper types and print types, produce well over fifty contract variants of their own.

Revenue leakage rarely arrives as one big disaster. It builds quietly: a price increase that never went through, a usage charge that was never billed, a contract that lapsed without anyone noticing.

Industry research puts the loss at somewhere between 3% and 9% of revenue, and the main culprits are no surprise: pricing and billing misconfiguration, manual data entry, and gaps between systems that don’t talk to each other. As long as the contract lives in one place, the invoice in another file, and the renewal date in a third spreadsheet, that leak is hard to avoid. Which is where the answer comes from: putting the whole thing in one place.

From contract to invoice: Dynamics 365 Subscription Billing

At Pargesoft we implement both of Microsoft’s ERP systems end to end: Dynamics 365 Business Central for small and mid-sized operations, Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain for larger, multi-company, multi-country structures. Both carry a Subscription Billing module that handles recurring billing and subscription contracts, and that module is what we spent most of the webinar demonstrating on screen.

The idea behind it is to treat the subscription, or the lease, as one unbroken flow from the first sales opportunity through to collection. A few pillars hold that flow together.

Flexible contracts and tiered pricing

You can tie a contract to a product, a service or a subscription line. Pricing can be built in tiers, say one rate up to 50 hours, another between 50 and 100, and a different one beyond that. Renewals, upgrades and downgrades, cancellations, adding new lines: all of it lives inside the contract. Higher-value contracts can route through an approval workflow first, with e-signature, so nothing goes live until the right people have signed off.

Billing calendars and proration

Subscriptions tend to mean monthly invoices, but they don’t have to. Weekly, quarterly and annual cycles are all fair game. Partial-period (proration) calculations, early-payment discounts and day-level proration come as standard, so the partial invoice for a contract that started mid-month is calculated correctly in a single step.

Usage-based billing

You can layer usage on top of the fixed fee. Pages printed and print type for a copier (the per-page, print-per-click model that managed-print providers run on), a unit price that changes above or below a threshold for an electricity distributor, variable items like toll charges on a vehicle. Once the meter reading lands in the system at period end, each transaction turns into an invoice line on its own.

E-invoicing wired in

Because Subscription Billing sits on top of the Business Central core (accounting, finance, inventory, sales, purchasing), invoices flow straight into e-invoice and e-archive processing. Even for a fleet of 10,000 vehicles you can generate the invoices in one pass and send them on to the integrator or the tax authority. We have customers issuing tens of thousands of invoices a month this way.

The half nobody sees: revenue and cost recognition

With these contracts, issuing the invoice is not the end of it. If you bill a 48-month contract once every six months but want to know what that contract earned you by the end of month three, there is a timing gap between the invoice you cut and the contract’s real revenue. Managing that gap properly means deferring revenue, spreading cost across the right period: in other words, genuine revenue and cost recognition.

Subscription Billing automates this with recognition schedules you define yourself. On both the revenue and the cost side, the moment you post an invoice you also land on the right figure for contract accounting. And it does this in line with international reporting standards such as IFRS 15 and ASC 606, the standards that companies leasing assets, or buying that service, and reporting internationally already know well. This is one of the module’s real strengths.

Seeing what is actually happening: Power BI

On top of the whole cycle, the module ships with Power BI dashboards. Monthly and annual recurring revenue (MRR/ARR), churn, net revenue retention, customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost are all there to track out of the box. You don’t have to build reporting from scratch to measure contract profitability, contract efficiency, or performance by service and contract type.

Operational leasing: getting into the cost side

Subscription Billing handles the revenue side very well. But operational leasing puts extra demands on the cost side and on accounting practice, and that is where Pargesoft’s operational leasing solution, built on top of Subscription Billing, comes in.

Here the leased asset itself is part of the equation. Vehicle leasing companies often grow their fleets through long-term syndicated loans, and the interest, currency differences and financing cost of those loans get carried onto the relevant vehicle. We call that capitalization. Depreciation, charges like vehicle tax and special consumption tax, links to insurance policies, tracking the offset when a claim is paid out: all of it ties back to the leased asset with the right reference. So each asset is managed end to end in a way that serves both the correct rental income and the correct rental cost.

The same logic follows the asset through its life and especially at the end of it: logging damage, tracking the insurance claim and the repair cost behind it, and estimating residual value so you know what the vehicle is worth when it comes back. On return, the damage assessment and that residual figure feed straight into the final settlement.

In practice that means seeing real profitability per license plate in car leasing, per device in photocopier leasing, per machine in forklift leasing. The operational leasing solution works alongside the service and maintenance module, fixed assets, the credit and leasing module, insurance policy management and bank integration.

You build the process from one end to the other: starting from a leasing quote, configuring the vehicle or the contract, calculating with flexible price models, managing different contract versions, signing, linking the insurance and credit documents, monthly automated billing, usage-based items (taxes, tolls, traffic fines), maintenance and service work orders, and at the end of term the damage assessment, residual-value calculation and final settlement before the asset moves on to remarketing. All of it under one roof.

One of our customers, among the top five players in Turkey’s vehicle rental market and running a fleet of around 18,000 vehicles, used this solution to bring its monthly invoicing time down by 80% and now reads per-vehicle profitability straight from a single screen.

Which solution fits your scale?

A quick compass. If your user count climbs past two hundred, if you run more than five legal entities, if your country count keeps growing, or if you need to manage IFRS adjustments in a separate accounting ledger, we point you toward Finance & Supply Chain, which carries multi-company and multi-currency structures more comfortably. That extra reach is where it shows: intercompany invoicing between group companies, contracts in different currencies, e-invoicing across more than one country (Turkey’s GİB e-invoice alongside Germany’s e-Rechnung, say), and IFRS 15 revenue split across the separate performance obligations in a bundled deal. For leaner, faster deployments, Business Central is usually enough. The functional scope of Subscription Billing is much the same on either side; the difference is in scale and reporting depth.

Pargesoft has been one of the leading partners in Microsoft’s business applications portfolio since its founding. We are in our 25th year in this field, with operations in three countries: Turkey, the UK and Belgium. Our journey began by adapting Microsoft’s ERP systems to Turkish regulation; today we deliver the full range of ERP, CRM, data analytics, low-code and AI agent solutions, paired with our own value-added modules. More than 400 ERP projects, and a place among the Dynamics partners with the most solutions listed on Microsoft AppSource, are the concrete results of that experience.