Ordway is releasing a new whitepaper, The Ultimate Guide to Architecting a Flexible Finance Stack for Complex Business Models, to help multilayered businesses prepare for the next stage of growth.  

This whitepaper was inspired by the challenges that our customers have encountered prior to partnering with Ordway, such as:

• Disconnected systems creating blockers and inhibiting growth
• Gaps between sales and finance teams 
• Costly systems maintenance and third-party consultants 

Our team is on a mission to help companies compete on a global scale through the Ordway platform. Today, I’m proud to announce our release of multi-entity billing and revenue management which means businesses can expand internationally with ease.

As your business grows, the last thing you want to worry about is if your finance stack will scale with you. I commissioned our team to leapfrog the limitations of legacy software and find solutions to multi-entity support that historically were only available to the Enterprise. Historically, only costly and clunky legacy ERP software could support multi-entity companies with their SaaS billing and accounting needs. This translated into manual workarounds and spreadsheets and hundreds of thousands spent on software fees and professional services, placing a drag on even the most nimble companies.

Today, companies can run their business units independently and still unify billing, revenue schedules, and reporting within one system on the Ordway billing and revenue automation platform.

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. 

As if the global marketplace wasn’t volatile enough, factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and a technical skills shortage are making it even more difficult for companies to make ends meet each month. 

As we discuss elsewhere, productivity is a big issue for today’s resource-constrained teams. This is especially the case with distractions brought about by the “new normal” of widespread work from home (WFH). Some employees are contending with getting their jobs done while also caring for family members and keeping households running smoothly (here's a list of 32 tips for working from home). As a result, more lean organizations around the world are finding it increasingly challenging to accomplish the many administrative tasks that consume so many hours of their days such as inputting contract details, setting billing schedules, sending reminders, and so on. Carving out time in the day to focus on strategic activities that can actually grow the business is an afterthought for upwards of 50% of an employee's time.

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.

We are about to finish a wonderful 2019 which saw us gain clients around the world. Organizations large and small chose to work with us because of our ability to support their revolutionary new business models. SaaS-based billing and revenue automation is empowering companies better connect their sales and finance functions and focus on building deep, performance-based relationships with their customers. We’re excited to support our clients as they lead the way in transforming their business.

Founders from the Rise of the Rest portfolio (ROTR) descended on Washington DC to network, learn from each other, and take advantage of top-notch programming from the ROTR team.

Prior to the official kick-off of the summit, we welcomed Founders from across the country for a bit of pre-networking with other DC Tech leaders. We were happy to facilitate good discussions on a wide number of topics including scaling up.

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.