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.

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. 

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of honoring three finance leaders in DC Tech for their hard work and innovation. We piggybacked our awards with DCA Live’s Star CFO virtual gala hosted by Doug Anderson. Although we wish we could deliver these awards in person, we will be donating to the World Central Kitchen on behalf of each recipient to show our gratitude for all that they do to make their organizations better. 

With the term “digital transformation” splashed across business pages for some years now, it’s far too easy to think of it as a “Big Bang” occurrence—a once-in-a-lifetime experience that alters the universe forever. Technology is constantly evolving and the digital transformations we’re witnessing today have their origins in long-progressing industry shifts. The seeds of these shifts were planted many seasons ago.

We’re very excited to announce that the Ordway billing and revenue automation platform is a 2020 TiE50 Winner in the prestigious TiE50 Awards Program. This ten-year old awards competition is a program of TiEcon, the world's largest conference for tech entrepreneurs.

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. 

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.

When we launched our billing and revenue automation platform to the world 18 months ago, I set high expectations for the founding team. Transforming the way sales and finance teams work together to modernize their business models is no small undertaking.

With customers around the world in industries including software development, healthcare, logistics, performance management, manufacturing, and finance, we’ve witnessed transformation first hand. Building on this foundation, today I’m excited to announce we’ve raised a $10M Series A led by CRV and joined by Clocktower Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.

The best aspect of working with Ordway clients is the fact that we get to watch our customers grow and thrive. A great idea, product/market fit, and team are critical to future success, but so is the infrastructure needed to scale. Oftentimes, we are fortunate to engage with customers right as they are re-imagining their billing architecture and infrastructure to enable more rapid growth and scale.

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.