Case Study: Financial Services
Vestwell Automates Quarterly Close and Scales without Adding FTEs
Discover how Vestwell, a fintech that is redefining 401k and workplace savings programs, leveraged Ordway to automate its recurring billing processes.
The client
Vestwell is creating the next generation of retirement plans.
Vestwell is scaling quickly and in an industry that requires them to have complex billing that includes accounting for 3rd-party fees. By adopting the Ordway billing and revenue automation platform, the Vestwell finance team streamlined quarterly usage-based billing and illuminated real-time revenue data to effectively report to the C-suite and their Board of Directors.
The challenge
Team wanted more finance automation and visibility into revenue
Some of the challenges Vestwell’s finance team struggled with included:
Month End Close
Every quarter, customer billing coincided with trying to close the books. The intensive month end process resulted many long nights trying to get manual invoice calculations correct.
Usage-Based Billing
Vestwell used spreadsheets to combine usage-based billing information from internal systems to generate invoices for customers. The manual process resulted in many hours rechecking invoices before sending.
Investor Reporting
The Vestwell finance team also struggled to accurately report real-time revenue snapshots and forecasts to external investors and internal stakeholders.
”Ordway is the next generation of billing and subscription management tools in the same way that I consider Vestwell to be the next generation of managing a retirement plan for small businesses."
Dave SheenChief Financial Officer
The solution
Sales-to-finance automation produces accurate billings for complex customers at scale
The Vestwell team integrated both their Salesforce instance with Ordway as well as their own SaaS product (retirement planning software system). This means contract details (amount of the deal, billing start date, terms, etc) automatically flow, error-free, to the Ordway platform. Additionally, each quarter, usage fees are automatically imported into the Ordway system from Vestwell databases to produce an accurate invoice for their customers.
Next-generation sales-to-finance workflow automation at Vestwell includes:
- Close win an opportunity in Salesforce
- Automatically set up recurring SaaS contracts in Ordway with proper terms, discounts, billing frequency, etc
- Automatically import usage-based billing information from Vestwell servers
- Send journal entries to QuickBooks
- Report monthly revenue via scheduled reports: SaaS metrics, Vestwell specific metrics and KPIs, etc.
The results
Finance automation generates worry-free invoicing, reduced expenses, and focused time for the CFO
A billing process that conflicted with their quarter-end close process, is now running smoothly in the background and saving them more than 10 days per quarter for simply getting invoices out the door. As a result, Vestwell has redeployed resources to more strategic activities for the business.
In fact, Vestwell estimates that by utilzing Ordway’s subscription billing and revenue recognition software meant they didn’t need to hire a full-time billing person in the high-cost, New York City market. This in itself could represent $40-60K of savings annually. Those dollars are now used to fund other Vestwell initiatives.
”Ordway frees up my time by doing the calculations that I otherwise couldn’t without the software. If not for the software, we would probably need another full time person just to handle our billing.”
Brendan KeoghController, Vestwell
