Case Study: Business Services
CareAcademy scales 6x without adding headcount
Discover how automating their usage-based billing process saves the CareAcademy team a week’s worth of manual work each month.
The client
CareAcademy enables home care givers with online learning programs.
CareAcademy provides high-quality, state-approved online caregiver training for home care agencies that increases caregiver knowledge. They have a training management platform for home care agencies to help manage the training requirements in their state based on the caregivers with whom they work. And, they sell a combination of different subscription types. Some have a flat SaaS fee billed upfront at the beginning of the month for that month’s services, while many clients have usage-based billing. Some customers are a combination, somewhere in the middle.
CareAcademy must manage intricacies within their usage-based billing model including different billing schedules, if the customer is on a hybrid SaaS subscription, and much, much more. Ordway was the only billing and revenue management solution that could work for their complex business model and do it in the most efficient way possible.
The challenge
Manual usage-based invoicing process consumed a week and was unsustainable.
Close to 20 different subscriptions and plans, some of which included usage-based billings resulted in manual creation of individual invoices each month. It could take four days based on the number of customers within each of the 20 different plans. As the company continued to scale, it was nearly impossible to manage their custom contracts and usage-based billing.
Just some of the challenges plaguing the team:
- Disconnected internal systems
- Completely manual and error-prone processes for billing
- Difficulty chasing down clients for overdue payments
- Manual revenue recognition process with QuickBooks general ledger
”“Because of usage-based billing and the manual time component in our prior setup, it was taking about four days to actually do monthly invoicing. And once we implemented Ordway, that got cut down to a matter of hours,”
Lily RocheDirector of Customer Success at CareAcademy.
The solution
Ordway platform manages bespoke contracts and usage-based billing.
CareAcademy was able to completely automate their usage-based billing and revenue recognition process and provide a “single-pane of glass” view of billing history to better support their customer success and operations team. Nearly 20 CareAcademy subscription contract templates were established within the Ordway platform which allowed new sales and renewal contracts to be easily added to future billing runs. Each month, CareAcademy usage data is imported to the Ordway platform automatically resulting in accurate invoices sent to customers at scale. Additionally, CareAcademy leverages the Ordway platform’s dunning functionality to automatically follow up with past-due customers and provide those customers frictionless methods to pay late invoices.
How CareAcademy configured the Ordway platform:
- Invoicing for a combination of SaaS and usage-based contracts
- Automatic collections and dunning
- Recognizing revenue and sending summary journal entries to QuickBooks
- Client billing history to empower CareAcademy customer success to provide better service
The results
CareAcademy scaled 6x without additional headcount, reduced the monthly billing process to hours.
“As head of customer success, the ability to really easily see a customer’s billing history is incredibly valuable,” said Lily Roche, Director of Customer Success at CareAcademy. “You get someone on the phone who has a question about their billing processes, or they want to know why they’re getting emails about an invoice. And the more information [customer success] has at their fingertips, the better prepared they seem, and therefore, the more comfortable the customer is. There’s nothing worse from a customer experience standpoint than having to hand someone off to three different people to get their questions answered.”
Using the Ordway platform to manage usage-based-billing created four major sources of ROI for CareAcademy:
- Faster Month End Close – Saved four days a month in manual processes, accelerating the month end accounting process by 90%.
- Higher Quality Reporting – Improved data accuracy giving internal teams confidence in their own data when speaking with customers.
- Scale Lean Finance Org – Grew 6X in terms of billing and usage data processed and still able to perform all billing tasks with one person.
- New Product Launches – Introduced new usage-based pricing and the platform was flexible enough to add the new model in a matter of hours.
”"The ability to really easily see a customer's billing history is incredibly valuable, makes the customer feel that we know what their account is, we're familiar with them and we're there to support,"
Lily RocheDirector of Customer Success at CareAcademy
