Have you considered the complexities involved in your current sales-to-finance workflow? From the time a new opportunity is created, to when that deal closes and a customer receives that all-important first invoice, challenges can arise.

Late last week, Citibank made headlines when, rather than sending $7.8M in interest payments on the behalf of their client (cosmetics giant Revlon), Citibank accidentally sent $900M to creditors.

In the past year, COVID-19 has completely changed the world we live in, and no business has been immune to these changes. In addition to transforming the way businesses operate day to day, COVID-19 has also affected the way businesses perform even their most core processes, including revenue recognition. 

About a month ago, Ordway reached out to me to share the following post with their audience. They had seen my work at Women Conquer Business helping organizations adapt and change in an age of disruption, and wanted to share this resource with you all as we approach 2021. 

Scaling a SaaS business is a unique challenge, and a good problem to have. The need to scale comes from an increase in customers and ARR, and likely greater headcount as well. As you scale, it’s critical that the backbone of your business- your billing and revenue system- is scaling along with you. 

We are thrilled to announce our next-generation billing and revenue automation platform has successfully completed an audit established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to certify its SOC 2 compliance. This audit means we have the controls necessary to deliver enterprise-quality software for our global customers. Our clients can rest knowing their order-to-revenue workflow is underpinned by the highest quality standards. 

I’m excited to join Ordway as head of Sales because in my 30 year career I’ve often been hampered in my ability to serve the needs of my customers, chiefly because the Finance team couldn’t support an ideal commercial relationship. 

We had the pleasure of visiting with CompStak just before the COVID-19 social distancing efforts took hold in both New York City where CompStak is headquartered, and Ordway HQ in Washington, D.C.

CompStak, a scaling startup with around 100 employees, is the leading crowdsourced platform for commercial real estate data. Growing quickly with a fairly complex business model, CompStak realized that they needed to replatform parts of their finance stack to keep up with their growth. During this transformation, they knew they wanted to stay on QuickBooks as their general ledger if they could. Their adoption of the Ordway billing and revenue automation platform meant they could continue to use QuickBooks and also “say yes” to complex Enterprise deals with unique pricing and terms.

Revenue growth at scale is the core goal of every business. Increasing profitable revenue growth is not the sole responsibility of the sales or marketing team. In today’s dynamic world, revenue optimization is a function of the entire organization and the technology and process that supports the effort: pricing experimentation, billing efficiency, CRM, professional services, and other processes. It is in this context that technology is playing a big role in revenue optimization through automation.

Sameer Gulati recently shared insights on scaling a startup outside of Silicon Valley with the audience at the Tom Tom festival in Charlottesville, Virginia. He took the stage with Entrepreneur's Editor in Chief, Jason Feifer, Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund Partner, David Hall, and STORD's Co-founder and CEO Sean Henry. 

Throughout the panel discussion, Jason as moderator was able to explore the differences between East Coast and West Coast Venture Capital (traction vs potential). The four panelists also discussed how to prove product market fit during the early phase of an organization's life cycle, and what it means to scale a business outside of a major tech hub like New York City, Silicon Valley, or Boston.