Automatically create subscriptions when a contract is signed | Zoho Billing and Zoho Contracts

In subscription-based businesses, a deal isn’t truly closed when the contract is signed; it’s closed when the first invoice goes out. Between those two points lies a gap filled with manual steps: adding customer details, setting up plans, and sending payment links.

What if your billing process could begin automatically the moment a contract is signed?

With Zoho Billing and Zoho Contracts integration via Zoho Flow, you can now automate this handoff, turning every signed contract into a live subscription and customer record.

The challenge of managing billing after contract signing

In most organizations, once a contract is signed, the finance team has to manually:

• Add the customer’s details into Zoho Billing.
• Create a new subscription for the purchased product or plan.
• Generate and send an invoice.

This manual process introduces a few key issues:

• Delays in onboarding: Customers can’t be billed until all details are entered.
• Human errors: Wrong plan, incorrect billing term, or duplicate records.
• Lack of visibility: Legal and finance teams work in silos, often re-entering the same data.

As deal volumes scale, these bottlenecks grow, delaying revenue recognition and increasing operational friction.

Automating subscription creation from signed contracts

Let's look into how the integration between Zoho Contracts and Zoho Billing via Zoho Flow addresses the above challenges. 

Zoho Contracts is an end-to-end contract lifecycle management solution that helps businesses streamline their contracts from authoring to execution and post-execution. 

When a contract in Zoho Contracts moves to the Active state (meaning both parties have signed), Zoho Flow triggers a workflow that automatically creates a customer and a corresponding subscription in Zoho Billing.

Here’s how it works:

Trigger: Contract status changes to Active in Zoho Contracts.

Actions:

1. Create a new customer in Zoho Billing.
2. Create a subscription record under the appropriate plan or product.

The result? Every signed contract instantly becomes an active subscription, without any manual steps.

How this works in practice

Imagine you’re selling a software product with three editions: Basic, Plus, and Pro.

When a customer decides to purchase the Pro plan, you draft a subscription contract in Zoho Contracts, collaborate with your legal team for review, and send it for approval and signature.

Both parties sign digitally, and the contract automatically moves to the Active state.

Behind the scenes, Zoho Flow triggers a workflow to create the customer record automatically in Zoho Billing, and also add a subscription record for the Pro plan.

Once your contract becomes active in Zoho Contracts, your Zoho Billing records are already up to date with customer, subscription, and plan information ready for invoicing.

No duplication. No delay. No missed details.

Why this integration matters

This integration ensures that your contract data doesn’t stay trapped in PDFs; it becomes operational.

Contract fields like customer name, plan type, billing term, and start date automatically flow into Zoho Billing. 

By connecting Zoho Billing and Zoho Contracts via Zoho Flow, businesses can:

• Accelerate revenue cycles: Billing begins the moment the contract is signed.
• Eliminate manual errors: No duplicate entry across systems.
• Improve compliance: Every billing record maps back to an approved contract.
• Enhance cross-team collaboration: Legal, sales, and finance teams operate from a unified data source.
• Deliver faster onboarding: Customers experience immediate service activation.

Whether you’re managing hundreds of subscriptions or a handful of key accounts, this automation brings precision, speed, and accountability to your billing operations.

Get started today

You can explore this integration in Zoho Flow and set it up in minutes. You can also connect with our team for assistance. Once configured, every new contract activation in Zoho Contracts automatically updates your Zoho Billing account with the corresponding customer and subscription details.

Bring your contracts and billing workflows together and let every signed agreement trigger the next revenue milestone.