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CloudCheckr found itself in a similar situation. The company has a cloud management solution that helps more than 500 companies including NASA, Intel, and Harvard University manage costs and security for public cloud environments such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
“As a startup company, we’re focused on top-line revenue and investing in the product,” said Sandy Burns, Vice President of Finance at CloudCheckr. “A lot of times administrative functions don’t always get the love and attention that sales and development do, until you have a real pain point.”
As described in our new customer success story, CloudCheckr reached its tipping point in 2019. Founded in 2011, the company was experiencing rapid growth in revenue, customers, and its workforce — up from 40 employees in late 2016 to 200 in 2020.
As a result, the accounting team struggled with multi-entity consolidations using QuickBooks and Excel across its U.S. base and a U.K. subsidiary. And it faced growing challenges in managing complex usage-based pricing and billing that varied by customers, from small startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, managed service providers, and government agencies.
A Contract-Centric Solution for SaaS Billing
CloudCheckr found its ideal replacement for QuickBooks and Excel with Sage Intacct, fulfilling its wish list for intuitive ease of use, rich slice-and-dice reporting, and flexibility to handle complex billing and streamline the order-to-cash cycle.
“We needed a system to track that contractual information and calculate the billings because it was very difficult and cumbersome to try to maintain it in Excel,” Burns said. “Our business was growing rapidly and we needed to be able to handle the volume and growth in our expanding customer base and revenue.”
After evaluating Oracle NetSuite and FinancialForce, CloudCheckr was especially impressed by the Sage Intacct Contracts module for automating billing, revenue recognition, forecasting, and metrics across diverse SaaS pricing models.
“The contract is our focal point for revenue, so the ability in Sage Intacct Contracts to be specific on pricing based on a contract was a key feature,” Burns said. Implementation by Sage Intacct partner AcctTwo, with expertise with Sage Intacct Contracts, put CloudCheckr on the fast track to success.
Closing the Books in 50% Less Time
In its first few months on Sage Intacct, CloudCheckr cut its monthly close time in half, from 10 days to five. Sage Intacct automation has eliminated about two days of painful manual work around multi-entity consolidation, currency conversions, journal entries, and deferred revenue management.
“We’ve reduced our time to close and put better controls in place as well,” Burns said.
More gains are in the pipeline as CloudCheckr integrates Sage Intacct Contracts with Salesforce CRM to speed the order-to-cash cycle and automate billing. Burns envisions a 50% improvement in time to invoice when the integration is complete, directly synching contracts information in Salesforce to Sage Intacct.
That will better align finance with sales operations and minimize reconciliations across disparate data sets, while improving CloudCheckr’s days sales outstanding (DSO) metric and accelerating cash flow. In this challenging environment, knowing your cash position is critical. Sage Intacct allows CloudCheckr to track A/R collections on a daily basis, reducing DSO and giving better visibility into cash flow during the pandemic.
CloudCheckr also aims to heighten customer service. Making Sage Intacct invoices available to account managers in Salesforce will eliminate the need for sales personnel to reach out to finance to address customer billing inquiries, improving responsiveness and the customer experience.
Data-Driven Insights to Adapt to COVID-19
With better analytics, CloudCheckr can identify its low usage customers and take proactive steps to improve ARR and retention.
Rich multidimensional reporting and dashboards in Sage Intacct are providing new data-driven insights that help CloudCheckr fine-tune its business and adapt to the COVID-19 crisis. The company has on-demand visibility into cash flow, costs, and revenue by various customer segments to better navigate through uncertain times.
In the past, Burns would have to add up figures on salaries, consulting costs, and other line items from about 10 accounts to size up costs by department or expense category. Sage Intacct reports make that task simple.
“I can slice and dice the information faster and in different ways in Sage Intacct,” Burns said. “It used to take me hours to create Excel spreadsheets to analyze information. I can drill into the information in Sage Intacct reports much more quickly.”
The move to Sage Intacct is also prompting greater collaboration between finance and business units. In one example, CloudCheckr’s marketing head is using Sage Intacct dashboards in shifting investments from in-person trade shows to more digital marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With their new marketing spend dashboard, Cloudcheckr could pivot from field to digital marketing and give business leaders real-time spend data. “He’s empowered to drill into marketing expenses through a Sage Intacct dashboard instead of having to ask finance for the details,” Burns said. “It’s giving him more visibility into digital marketing spend to make sure we’re getting the right return from investments.”
See our CloudCheckr customer success story to learn more about how the company is benefiting with its upgrade to Sage Intacct.
