Case Study: Retail
Springboard switches to Ordway to support rapid growth
Ordway replaces Recurly for subscription management and SaaSOptics deferred revenue
The client
Springboard Retail offers a market leading, cloud-based Point-of-Sale application.
Springboard Retail, a division of Heartland Retail, is scaling quickly and that meant replacing Recurly for subscription management and SaaSOptics deferred revenue features with Ordway’s end-to-end platform. By adopting the Ordway billing and revenue automation platform, they are saving time in their quote-to-cash process, being proactive on forecasting, trending in the right direction on accounts receivable, and saying yes to creative deals their sales team generate.
The challenge
Scaling on legacy systems was causing more problems than solving
Springboard Retail’s 50% year-over-year (YoY) growth was straining the systems they had in place to manage their subscription business. They sell a retail Point of Sale software platform. In addition, they offer one-time data migration services, as well as other professional services. They had Recurly to manage their subscription billing and SaaSOptics to manage deferred revenue.
“The problem with that was we’ve got all these different latency issues between the two,” said Slater Latour, VP Finance at Springboard Retail. “So there were timing issues and systems wouldn’t agree. It was really hard to understand the flow from quote-to-cash, end-to-end.”
Springboard sales operations and billing team had to:
- Manually enter customer quote data from Salesforce into Recurly to set up the customer subscription
- Manually enter data from Salesforce into SaaSOptics to manage deferred revenue
- Reconcile data entry issues as well as latency issues between disparate systems
”Our sales team is creative with some of the things they come up with with our customers. And we haven’t we haven’t seen anything from them that we couldn’t handle in Ordway pretty easily,”
Slater LatourVP Finance at Springboard Retail.
The solution
Adoption of Ordway creates end-to-end, quote-to-cash system of record
Springboard Retail conducted a cross functional review of the Ordway billing and revenue automation platform. They valued the Ordway executive team’s experience building enterprise-class ERP and billing software. Additionally, Ordway’s investors gave them confidence. Most importantly, the results of their technical review of the Ordway API assured them they were making the right decision.
Today, Springboard’s retail Point of Sale (POS) business can:
- Send customer quotes in conjunction with Salesforce to ensure data integrity of unique subscription/contract details
- Automate billing for Springboard’s large customer base of over 1,000 retail establishments
- Utilize a robust RESTful API that integrates with Springboard systems. For example, Springboard is able to test pricing quickly at scale
- Generate accurate billing and deferred revenue schedules based on the unique pricing and contract terms
- Close the books faster by sending summary journal entries to QuickBooks
- Provide visibility into their business with custom, ad-hoc reports that can be saved and reused to monitor business health over time.
Listen to Springboard describe the evaluation process.
Two big differences between Ordway and SaaSOptics and Recurly according to Springboard Retail
- Ability to handle unique payment terms and schedules
- Defining and saving custom reports based on the unique needs of their business
The results
Improved forecasting, accounts receivable, and time savings
As exciting, the flexibility of the Ordway platform means that the finance team can say “yes” to all the creative deals their sales team generates. They are no longer bound by a rigid billing system.
Reduced errors during the sales-to-finance handoff is also a boon for the Springboard team. Hours and hours spent each month reconciling data across multiple systems is now repurposed for more important tasks. Operational efficiency gains also led to accounts receivable trending in the right direction.
“We close a customer, add them to Ordway, and we’re done with them and don’t really have to worry about if they are going to be billed appropriately,” said Hannah Morris, Financial Operations Manager. ”We can set all of that up when the customer closes and not have to worry about it again.”
”I can provide much better guidance to our CEO around our liquidity position, about what’s going to come in, and around what products are working and growing and which ones are not… It all comes back to that ability to be a strategic partner for the rest of the business.”
Slater LatourVP of Finance at Springboard Retail
