How the Finance Team Drove IPO-readiness at a Leading SaaS Business

Gone are the days when finance teams were happy being backstage coordinators, happy to hand in numbers when asked. They have clearly broken the mold to take center stage and become strategic partners for business growth. Today with businesses facing economic pressures, driving profitability by enabling efficient revenue practices has become more crucial than ever. As a partner to multiple finance leaders, Chargebee witnesses how modern finance teams drive strategies that help businesses tide over economic pressures toward sustained growth.

Here’s a story of how a finance team in a $50M+ ARR SaaS business leveraged automation to tide over billing complexities as the business readies itself for its next phase of growth.

“If we don’t fix our current messy billing, we won’t IPO.”

– Head of Financial Systems & Processes

If you’re a finance leader looking to revolutionize your Financial Operations (Finops) and discover meaningful ways to aid growth for your business, read on.

As a Business Scales, So Does Its Billing Complexity

Our client in focus found their customer base growing, and while it is always a good indicator of business health, it brought in a new set of billing complexities.

Expansion into new geographies with unique compliance rules, the sales team wanting to run special offers and discounts, and the leadership wanting to see coherent reports on financial health. This resulted in an overworked, tired finance team trying to stitch data from multiple platforms and struggling with some distinct growth pains:

(1) Their billing wasn’t compliant with worldwide taxes, which made it a nightmare to expand the business across the global horizons.

“Most solutions, while claiming to be global, only cater to major countries, leaving gaps in the rest of the world, leaving it challenging to take our business global.”

– Director of Accounting and Revenue

(2) The sales team was manually creating their own enterprise plans, discount coupons, and issuing invoices and refunds. This made it impossible to verify and keep track of the monthly billing and invoicing. The team wanted to standardize creating on-the-fly plans and reduce the manual work to a minimum. 

(3) The team struggled with siloed integrations with multiple tools used across their subscription revenue lifecycle, right from sales management, invoicing, and billing, to payments. This led to

• misalignment in teams 
• a clunky in-house user experience
• absence of a single source of truth for their revenue analytics

“Previously if we wanted to know a revenue number, we’d have to go back to all the operational systems and try to guess what is in there. Having a single source of truth is what I wanted to achieve by having all the information in the subscription management tool.”

– Head of Financial Systems & Processes

How an Integrative Tech-Stack Solves Billing Woes at Scale

In their quest to automate billing and build a truly future-forward finance team, they found Chargebee to be their perfect ally. 

(1) Automating compliance, whether it’s taxes, revenue recognition, or payment regulations was a cakewalk with Chargebee. They could generate recurring invoices adhering to global tax mandates without any manual intervention. This enabled them to focus on scaling up and enabling growth without worrying about domestic and/or international tax requirements.

(2) The team could automate recurring invoices, manage different pricing models, introduce metered billing, add different currencies, and add discounts in bulk, in minutes with Chargebee.

(3) A major win for them when using Chargebee was our tight integrations with platforms like Salesforce that catered to all of their workflows, allowing them to keep track of the leads generated, deals closed, and new acquired customers. 

(4) And, finally, they could sync information from accounting systems such as Netsuite seamlessly with Chargebee and make exhaustive revenue reports accessible at their fingertips. Moreover, reporting with Revenue Story and Report Builder helped them drill down to the deepest layer of their subscription revenue analytics, building custom reports using filters as specific as country or jurisdiction-based restrictions.

“I think that apart from the reduction in the manual work, the advantage comes from the more streamlined process that the native integrations provide which will ensure a complete and accurate data flow between systems, the reporting capabilities, the tax compliance, the user-friendliness, adopting more payment methods and having currency choices, among other things.” — Head of Financial Systems & Processes

Building Efficient Revenue Processes with Automation

The moral of the story is that to drive uninterrupted growth for your SaaS business, you as a finance leader need to break free from the traditional, inflexible finance systems. Like our client in focus, take the step to invest in automated billing software like Chargebee that acts as an ally to your finance team.

Free them from manual redundant tasks and enable them to build data-driven business processes that directly contribute to business growth.

What are you waiting for?

Get Started with Chargebee