Case Study: Business Services
Qu automates complex billing and sales tax calculations
Qu recovers lost revenue, increases customer loyalty, and frees up 50% of an FTE’s time
The client
Qu is fueling the restaurant commerce revolution.
Qu provides technology solutions for Quick Service and Fast Casual chains. Extending far beyond a typical Point of Sale (POS) solution, Qu powers both traditional on-premise experiences such as point of sale, kiosks, and drive thrus as well as the fast growing, off-premise scenarios such as online ordering via mobile apps. Qu’s customers are multi-location and multi-channel, sometimes with thousands of locations across the country, creating a significant number of financial challenges such as sales taxes and consolidated billing.
The challenge
Qu’s manual workarounds struggled to fill the gaps between disparate systems and exhausted employee time.
- Missing invoices and lost revenue
- Incorrect calculations that frustrated customers
- Unnecessary late payments
Qu was scaling quickly, and the growing complexity around invoicing and revenue recognition made it especially hard for Qu to keep up with their order-to-revenue workflow, and they found that throwing employee hours at their fragile process was not a sustainable way to scale their business. Qu quickly needed to find a way to bridge their business systems and automate their workflows.
”“We have customers around the U.S. in all 50 states, and most of our customers want consolidated billing. So what does that mean? They have more than 10 locations but billed a single invoice. And for the tax laws, we need to calculate taxes based on the shipping location or the customer’s actual address.”
Sachin AgarwalController at Qu.
The solution
Bridging CRM to General Ledger to ensure billing and revenue data flow automatically and accurately.
The Qu team decided to invest in the Ordway billing and revenue automation platform to act as the flexible bridge between their CRM, business systems, and general ledger, and accomplish all the billing and revenue management tasks in between. With turnkey API integrations, Qu transformed their finance stack to meet the needs of their business. Salesforce, QuickBooks, and Avalara are now communicating with each other, and at the center, Ordway is orchestrating and automating all the moving pieces in the order-to-revenue workflow.
The integration between Ordway, Salesforce, Quickbooks, and Avalara allows them to:
- Automate monthly invoicing for their customers (some of whom have parent/child franchise relationships)
- Make mid-term contract adjustments (which has been especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic)
- Simplify collecting state and local taxes.
“Ordway is sending all the customers’ actual locations to Avalara to get the actual tax rate and then getting the correct taxes calculated for each and every shipping location. And within the same invoice, I am sending one invoice to a very big customer which has more than 100 locations in the U.S. One consolidated invoice has all the child invoices with the individual tax rate or individual tax jurisdiction. It’s very simple.”
The results
Qu recovers lost revenue, increases customer loyalty, and frees up 50% of a team member’s time.
Ordway’s Customer Success team worked closely with the team at Qu to implement the subscription billing, revenue recognition, and accounts receivable automation modules. By bridging their CRM to General Ledger in a matter of weeks instead of the months that are expected with other legacy ERP and billing systems, Qu was able to manage the complexities of their business even before COVID-19 started to impact the wider economy.
“[With] the help of Ordway, we were able to integrate QuickBooks and Avalara both together…. Avalara and Ordway are integrated very smoothly. I don’t feel any problems.”
Qu left behind their manual and error-prone processes and automated their order-to-revenue workflow to:
- Save employee time. Qu estimates that 50% of an operations team member’s time is now available for other more important projects
- Create a better customer experience through information-rich invoices and statements
- Recover lost revenue from previously improperly invoiced customers
- Streamline their monthly close process
”“Partnering with Ordway has been hands down the best decision that we’ve made. There really isn’t another choice looking back on it.”
Sachin AgarwalController at Qu.
