Success Story: Public cloud management SaaS vendor poised for 50% improvement in order to cash

Company overview

Based in Rochester, New York, CloudCheckr’s comprehensive cloud management solution helps businesses manage costs and security for public cloud environments.

Results with Sage Intacct

• On track to accelerate billing time by 50%.
• Reduced monthly close time from 10 days to five.
• Cut 1-2 days of manual consolidation and deferred revenue recognition work.
• Improved reporting, scenario planning, and forecasting between finance and SalesOps.

“Sage Intacct is definitely improving our subscription billing accuracy and timeliness based on complex contracts and unique pricing models, and we have much better forecasting and analytics. We’re on track to cut our time to invoice in half.”

Sandy Burns
Vice President of Finance, CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr streamlines complex billing amid rapid growth

Founded in 2011, CloudCheckr supplies a comprehensive platform that helps organisations manage security, utilisation, and cost across public clouds such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. CloudCheckr technology delivers visibility and governance for more than 500 customers, from small startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, managed service providers, and government agencies, including NASA, Harvard University, Salesforce, Intel, and Lockheed Martin. Named by CIOReview as one of the top 20 cloud solution companies in 2020, CloudCheckr says that it helps customers “turn complexity and chaos into clarity.”

Yet until recently, CloudCheckr itself faced complexity and a lack of clarity in accounting and finance. Rapid growth in revenue and the workforce — up from 40 employees in late 2016 to 200 in mid-2020 — left the finance team scrambling to keep up with a combination of QuickBooks and Excel. Multi-entity consolidations across CloudCheckr’s U.S. base and a U.K. subsidiary consumed at least a half-day each month. Up to a full day of manual work went into managing deferred revenue, while CloudCheckr lacked the financial visibility it needed. Especially problematic was trying to manage complex usage based pricing across various models in Excel, and manually inputting that data into QuickBooks for monthly, quarterly, and annual billing that varied by customer.

“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,” said Vice President Finance, Sandy Burns. “Our business was growing rapidly and we needed to be able to handle the volume and growth in our expanding customer base and revenue,” said Sandy. CloudCheckr found its ideal solution with the Sage Intacct cloud financial management platform, generating new finance efficiencies and visibility, and helping it adapt to changes triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A 50% faster monthly close with strengthened controls

CloudCheckr evaluated Oracle NetSuite and FinancialForce before selecting Sage Intacct, based in part on capabilities in its Contracts module to manage and automate billing, revenue recognition, forecasting, and metrics across diverse SaaS pricing models. Sandy found that Sage Intacct’s subscription-centric solution was better geared for a SaaS company than NetSuite. “The contract is our focal point for revenue, so the ability in Sage Intacct Contracts to be specific on subscription and services pricing based on a contract was a key feature,” Sandy said.

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 painful manual work around multi-entity consolidation, currency conversions, journal entries, and deferred revenue management. CloudCheckr has also implemented better processes, such as a monthly balance sheet review compared to inconsistent approaches in the past. “We’ve reduced our time to close and put better controls in place as well,” Sandy 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 its complex billing.
She can now track A/R collections on a daily basis, reducing DSO and giving better visibility into cash flow during COVID-19. Sandy envisions a 50% improvement in time to invoice when the integration is complete, directly syncing contracts information in Salesforce to Sage Intacct. That will better align finance with sales operations and minimise reconciliations across disparate data sets, while improving CloudCheckr’s days sales outstanding (DSO) metric and accelerating cash flow. In addition, CloudCheckr plans to make Sage Intacct invoices available to account managers in Salesforce. That 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

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, Sandy 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,” Sandy said. “It used to take me hours to create Excel spreadsheets to analyse information. I can drill into the information in Sage Intacct reports much more quickly,” Sandy added. The move to Sage Intacct is also prompting greater collaboration between finance and business units. Features like chat boxes built into Sage Intacct are helping streamline communications as compared to email exchange. In one example, CloudCheckr can readily identify customers at minimal usage thresholds for its services and from that data, has implemented steps to improve ARR and retention.

With those usage insights, customer success managers can reach out to customers to address any questions and encourage them to take full advantage of the solution, which can reduce churn and even drive upsells. In another 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. “He’s empowered to drill into marketing expenses through a Sage Intacct dashboard instead of having to ask finance for the details,” Sandy said. “It’s giving him more visibility into digital marketing spend to make sure we’re getting the right return from investments,” Sandy concluded.

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Image source: Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash