Bastle vs ScaleXP

Accounting basis versus billing basis

This is the whole comparison, so it is worth stating precisely. ScaleXP produces metrics that reconcile to recognised revenue: an annual contract billed up front is recognised across twelve months, the journals post to your ledger, and the ARR on the dashboard ties to the accounts. Bastle produces metrics on a billing basis: that same annual contract is normalised to a monthly-equivalent MRR for reporting, but nothing is recognised, no journal is posted and nothing ties to a ledger.

Neither is more correct. They answer different questions, and a company that needs both usually needs both. But if your CFO's requirement is that the metrics in the board pack agree with the management accounts, Bastle cannot deliver that and ScaleXP is designed to.

What ScaleXP does that we do not

Automated ASC 606 and IFRS 15 recognition. GL journal posting. Locked periods with an audit trail an auditor will accept. Multi-entity consolidation and full multi-currency reporting — Bastle converts to a single account currency and preserves the originals, which is not the same as consolidating across legal entities. And AI applied to revenue allocation, which is a sensible place to put it if accounting workflow is your product.

We have no partial credit to claim on most of these. They are absent.

What Bastle is for instead

The operational question, asked mid-week by someone who is not in finance. Why did MRR move, which plan has the worst six-month retention, which annual renewals in the next thirty days are at risk — answered in a sentence by Ask, with the specific customers and invoices cited so it can be checked in seconds. Around that: 28 subscription metrics with definitions you control, cohort tables, stackable segmentation including your own imported attributes, failed-payment recovery, cancellation reason capture with save offers, live investor rooms, and a REST API with signed webhooks, a CLI and an MCP server.

Bastle does connect QuickBooks Online and Xero, but only to pull expense and cash actuals into forecasting. That is not an accounting integration in ScaleXP's sense and should not be read as one.

Running both

The sensible architecture for a company that needs recognised-revenue reporting is to keep it in the system built for it and put the operational layer alongside. Bastle is free while in beta and connects in about two minutes, so evaluating it next to whatever produces your accounts is cheap. What it should not be asked to do is replace the thing your auditor signs off.

Who wrote this page

Bastle did, and Bastle benefits if you choose Bastle. That is a bias no amount of good intent removes, so the useful thing is to make it checkable rather than to claim it away. Every capability claim above is specific enough to disprove in an afternoon, the case for the other product gets the same room as the case for ours, and anything that works differently rather than not at all is marked partial.

Read this alongside the other vendor's own documentation, not instead of it. If something here is wrong about their product, tell us: corrections are treated as bugs rather than as debate, the page gets fixed and its research date is reset so you can see it was revised. That applies whether the correction makes them look better or us look worse.