Mac Mastery: How MacStadium Powered up Billing & Cut Month-End Closing by 60%

MacStadium, launched in 2012, provides enterprise-level Apple Mac infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) using a subscription model. They provide fully scalable private clouds and dedicated servers that are secure and reliable for macOS workloads. Being a leader worldwide in Mac hosting, MacStadium has been on the "Deloitte Technology Fast 500" list for the past six years. MacStadium’s robust software-enabled infrastructure and groundbreaking technology deliver the security, performance, reliability, and flexibility required for successful App development on Apple devices.

The Problem

MacStadium’s business model is primarily based on the number of servers their customers subscribe to, and it’s very common for them to start with a few servers and add more later. Whenever a customer added a server to their existing subscription, it created a new subscription in Chargify (now part of Maxio), their previous billing system. So their customers ended up having thousands of monthly subscriptions and invoices.

Besides being taxing for our team to go through hundreds of subscription records in Chargify to find the right information, sending multiple invoices instead of a consolidated invoice always risked customers missing out on some payments. Another challenge was that we couldn’t issue credit notes with Chargify — we had to create them on our own, and it didn’t inspire confidence in our customers.

Mark Gagen, Director of Finance, MacStadium

In addition, the MacStadium team wanted these capabilities:

• The flexibility to unlink a wrongly applied external payment and map it with another invoice

• Robust API infrastructure that can empower their customers to make changes to their subscription plan through their self-serve portal

• In-depth integrations with Salesforce and NetSuite

• Accurate revenue recognition and audit-ready reports. “We manually managed revenue recognition on spreadsheets, which was very time-consuming. If we found anomalies during month-end closes, it was tedious to trace it back to the original transaction and verify,” said Mark.

The Solution

• Product Catalog and Billing Flexibility: Chargebee’s robust Product Catalog met all of MacStadium’s requirements. By configuring the base subscription fees as plans and additional server units as recurring add-ons, they consolidated each customer's entire subscription into one record instead of hundreds. They also enjoyed the flexibility to update wrongly mapped invoice payments and issue credit notes for refunds, centralizing billing and subscription management in one system.

• Salesforce Integration: “Chargebee’s Salesforce integration has been of great help to our sales teams. It provides them with live access to customers’ subscription information — from plan and add-on details to MRR, as these can quickly get outdated without a real-time sync,” Mark said.

• White Glove Service: For Mark and the MacStadium team, the timely, personalized assistance from the Customer Success Manager and the Technical Account Manager is one of the major benefits of choosing Chargebee. “The support is just best-in-class, providing excellent communication, transparency, and timely resolutions whenever we need help. I can’t say that I’ve worked with any partner that provides better customer service than Chargebee. It’s fantastic working with a company that’s there for us every step of the way to make sure we’re as happy as we can be,” he added.

Growth Reimagined with Chargebee: 60% Faster Revenue Recognition with Chargebee RevRec

After Mark’s team streamlined the entire billing and subscription management cycle with Chargebee Billing, they turned to Chargebee RevRec to fix the missing piece of the puzzle, revenue recognition.

With Chargebee RevRec’s rule-driven revenue management, Mark defined ratable revenue recognition policies for performance obligations such as renewals, expansions, cancellations, and mid-term contract modifications. For their ‘reseller’ type customers, Chargebee RevRec’s detailed revenue reports offer them more granularity over recognized and deferred revenue both at a parent and child entity level.

"By implementing Chargebee RevRec and leveraging its automation and enhanced reporting features, we have reduced our accounting close time from 10 days to just four days, which we’re optimizing further. This increased efficiency allows our finance team to allocate more time towards strategic projects, contributing to our company's growth."