Kill Bill vs Candis
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Kill Bill grinds out invoice-reliability fixes on a mature 0.24.x line.
Kill Bill remains a mature open-source subscription-billing engine in steady maintenance on its 0.24.x line. Recent releases concentrate on invoice-processing reliability — retries, account parking on unrecoverable failures, and uniform failure logging — plus catalog and payment-plugin bug fixes. The 0.25.0 tag was cut in late June but shipped with no release notes, so its scope is unclear.
The direction is hardening, not expansion: most point releases are bug fixes and dependency updates rather than new capability. Invoice failure handling has recurred across the last several releases, pointing to an effort to make billing runs resilient to bad plugin and catalog states rather than fail silently. The parallel 0.25.0 tag hints a new minor line is being prepared, but there is no visible feature content yet.
Expect continued 0.24.x point releases on the same bug-fix cadence; whether 0.25.0 carries real new features will not be clear until it ships with actual release notes.
Candis collapses approval-workflow sprawl — dynamic approvers and mandatory step fields land alongside an editor revamp.
The centerpiece of this window is a five-part Workflows release: a redesigned workflow editor, configurable mandatory fields per approval step, dynamic-field approver resolution (the right approver is picked from the receipt data — cost-center owner, project owner, invoice recipient), custom step labels, and the ability to import a workflow from another organization. Around that, Candis added Visa Click to Pay, a new layout and attachment support for Auslagen/Reisekosten (expenses and travel), an upcoming streamlined document layout (in beta from June 15), and improved automatching between credit-card transactions and invoices.
Candis is reducing the number of workflow templates a finance team has to maintain — dynamic approver resolution and mandatory-fields-per-step replace what used to be a copy-paste workflow per cost center. The expense/document side gets steady UX polish on a separate cadence. Together it reads as a product moving from configurable-but-fiddly AP toward an opinionated AP backbone for German mid-market finance.
Expect dynamic-field resolution to widen beyond approvers — likely to account assignment and cost-center splits — and the upcoming document-layout beta to roll out as the default in late June. The cross-org workflow import has the shape of a future template marketplace if Candis chooses to lean into it.
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