Modernizing Order to Cash: A CFO’s Guide to Scalable Billing

For CFOs in SaaS and tech companies, the Order to Cash cycle has become a pressure point; one that can quietly drain revenue, blur forecasts, and frustrate cross-functional teams. As pricing models become more dynamic and customer expectations shift, legacy billing workflows simply can’t keep up.

Join the CFO Leadership Council and Zone & Co for a fast-paced, 60-minute session exploring how modern finance leaders are embracing usage-based billing and automation to build resilient, efficient, and scalable revenue operations. This session is built specifically for CFOs and finance leaders dealing with high-volume contracts, product-led growth, or hybrid pricing models.

But billing isn’t just a finance problem. Sales, product, and engineering teams also have skin in the game. You’ll walk away with insights into how to align departments and choose solutions that work for everyone — from accurate revenue recognition to seamless API integrations.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

• Spot hidden friction in your current Order to Cash lifecycle — and what it’s costing you.
• Use automation to reduce DSO, audit risk, and manual effort.
• Support usage-based and hybrid pricing models without engineering bottlenecks.
• Evaluate whether your current billing system is built to scale (or holding you back).
• Align product, engineering, and finance when choosing a billing platform — with real-world examples of what technical teams care about (think: usage aggregation, API access, customer portal visibility).

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Transcript

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Kristin Todd: Well, hello everyone and welcome to today's CFO Leadership Council Program, modernizing order-to-cash, a CFO's Guide to Scalable Billing. We are so honored that you chose to be here with us today, and of course, a special thanks to Zone and Company. They're reinventing the way companies approach back office excellence. They are a longstanding friend of the CFO Leadership Council Community and today's exclusive webinar sponsor.

I'm Kristin Todd with the CFO Leadership Council, and I'll be facilitating today's program. A quick shout out to my colleague Nancy Ellers, who's working her magic behind the scenes of course.

Now, of course, the big reason we've gathered today. We are joined by our special guest speaker, Keith Goldschmidt, VP Strategy and alliances from Zone and Company, and some fun facts about Keith. He's a CPA and an evangelist for ecosystem led growth. He will tell you much more in a moment, but let's just say you're in very good hands. Welcome, Keith. The floor is all yours.

Keith Goldschmidt: Awesome. Thank you so much Kristin. So happy to be here with you all. It's been a while since I've been in the CFO Leadership Council.

Despite being a CPA, I haven't worked in accounting and finance for a couple years. I've moved over to the software side of things, but I did start my career in in multiple different forms of auditing. I spent about 12 years in a combination of external and internal audit ending up as the head of internal audit for a publicly traded company that I helped to take through IPO and SEC filings and SOC compliance. But at that point I started building systems. I started with SAP ECC on premise, but that makes me sound old for sure. But after three years of doing that, I realized that there was a much faster and more nimble way.

And at that point I went to work for NetSuite in their CFO Center of Excellence for about five years. And I've spent the last five years at Zone & Co. We'll do some descriptions of Zone & Co later in the presentation. But suffice to say that we are order-to-cash and billing and revenue experts, as well as NetSuite ecosystem experts.

For today's agenda, I plan to walk, walk through some market insights, what we're seeing in the order-to-cash space and what we're seeing in general in the market overall. From there we'll dive into some order-to-cash operational efficiencies and the impact of the tech stack in the order-to-cash realm. So the business impact, we'll get into some key performance indicators and metrics and how to improve those overall by selecting the right order-to-cash tech stack. We'll get into some evaluation of billing and revenue tools. And then shameless introduction of myself and our company as we get into ZoneBilling.

So I if we will leave some time in the very end for some quick questions and answers, but at the end of the day, if you want to submit your questions, please do hit that chat button. Engage with us. We would love for this to be a session where you take us all different directions based upon what you feel like needs to be spoken to.

We are going to kick this off real early. I hope everybody's here and logged in because we have a poll. And Kristen, I think this is over to you.

Kristin Todd: Yes. Thank you so much, Keith. Alright, the poll question. How would you classify your company strategy? Answer options? We recently took private equity funding, preparing for exit after years in PE portfolio, we are in merger and acquisition mode, a mix of both or other, and we'll give you about a minute to answer those.

Keith Goldschmidt: Yeah, this is really interesting to me. It's going to feed into the, the next section of the presentation and we could pivot based upon the answers, but the, we, we do want to speak to some market trends that we've been seeing on the company strategy point and, you know I won't spoil what's coming, but some potential changes to private equity funding and

without further ado, I'm gonna hop into some of our market insights and trends that we're seeing. Overall, it, the answers did comply with exactly what I was expecting, and this is going to lead into lead into the trends that we're seeing in the marketplace really well.

We're really excited to get into the meat of the presentation and discuss what the subscription billing market looks like today and into the future. This, this quote was grabbed from Global Market Insights. The adoption of subscription based models is becoming more and more commonplace. What represented a $6 billion market in 2023? And that sounds huge, right? $6 billion is a huge market trend is expected to grow between grow in excess of 16% CAGR and we're going to increase to about $22 billion by 2032. This is not only for the software as a service business, businesses, as you'll see throughout today's presentation, it covers many different industries, including media e-com and, and more.

Everybody's trying to take advantage of subscription revenue at this moment in time. Effective management of these subscriptions is going to separate the winners from the failed businesses in the future. Just having a great idea isn't quite enough any longer.

So what we're seeing in the marketplace is a private equity funding is down. This is signaling a major pullback in growth stage capital. Venture capital is also in decline, especially for later stage and growth at all cost models. The investors on the private equity and venture capital side are demanding profitability and disciplined financial operations from earlier stage companies, more than they ever have before.

So this slow first half, is evident here with private equity funds gathering nearly $384 billion in the first half of 2025, which is down 70% on the same period a year prior. This marks the weakest first half total since the pandemic stricken year of 2020 when $307 billion was raised. The first half of 2025 has also been characterized by geopolitical uncertainty stemming from the US' tariff policy and ongoing war in the Middle East. These are the trends that we're seeing that are alluding to a decrease overall in acquisition and funding from the private equity and venture capital fields.

As focus is shifting from having brilliant ideas that just need funding. Toward businesses with real true operational excellence. The rule of 40 is becoming the key benchmark for funding, and it's not just the rule of 40 any longer. To achieve the highest valuations, we're hearing rule of 50, 60 and even greater to achieve the exit values that were once garnered In this industry. Repeatable, scalable, and efficient business models are being valued much, much higher than the rapid unsustainable growth of the prior decade.

This is formulaic at this point, and companies need to be able to prove that all of the key metrics like NDR, LTV to CAC, sales and marketing efficiency, and a really key one, free cash flow are all trending in the right direction to sustain and build beyond the rule of 40.

In the wake of the decrease in funding for the rapid growth businesses with great ideas and marketability, we see a market impact towards the increase in mergers and acquisitions. This agrees with the poll that that all of you just filled out. We see a lot more market and merge merging and acquisition activity in the marketplace that we ever had in the past.

M&A activity reached an all time high through the first half of 2025, as the riskier bets are being taken by companies rather than the equity market. We've seen this trend steadily increasing over the past two and a half years, but 2025 is prime to set all the records for consolidation of large companies.

The trend of consolidation of synergistic companies is leading to a need to incorporate multiple businesses under single umbrellas faster, and consolidate costs. The merged and acquired businesses often look very, very different from each other internally, and cutting the costs to modernize systems quickly is a real challenge.

This challenge needs to be met with the most scalable and agile tools in the marketplace, especially as it applies to the order-to-cash process. It is not simple to combine finance operations, record to report, or procure to pay, but the process and output of these workflows as the same end goal. We're producing financials, reporting to the board of directors and and management on the key metrics, or we're paying our bills.

order-to-cash is different and complex. And that's due to the underlying selling models, leading to multiple ways to price, package, bill, and perhaps the most complicated piece, recognize revenue. For CFOs, this is the crux of the situation and this is where we need to get to a scalable solution. Let's pause one more second and take a quick poll to see how the audience is meeting these challenges head on.

Kristin Todd: Okay. I'll read it to you all, just for ease question, what best describes your company's current approach to O2 C?

order-to-cash systems, your choices. We use a single ERP or enterprise cloud platform, best of breed tech stack with point solutions. We're somewhere in between with a mix of platforms. We're still figuring out our strategy and thanks for your quick responses. Keith, any thoughts on this? Any predictions?

Keith Goldschmidt: I, I, I'm surprised to see very, very few best of breed tech stack with point solutions.

Honestly, we were expecting that to be the leading answer because we're experiencing more and more of that in the ecosystem. But I'm also happy to hear that because I'm gonna talk about some of the inefficiencies when it comes to that.

Sorry for the two of you who went that direction.

Kristin Todd: That's why we do polls. Right? All right. There's, there's the results there.

Keith Goldschmidt: Awesome. A lot of, somewhere in between, multiple different platforms. A lot of, we're still figuring out that strategy and that's common, you know, with, with, with growing companies, it is really difficult to figure out order-to-cash right away. It is a very complex process.

So order-to-cash can't just be accurate any longer. Right. Because of the key metrics that are outlined in the earlier section. It matters how efficient you are when you're, when getting cash and revenue in the door. You might recall me discussing sales and marketing efficiency as well as LTV to CAC ratios. And how much you spend to gain a dollar is critical to the business' valuation, whether that be upon exit or funding.

order-to-cash is a process that spans many teams throughout an organization, which includes marketing, sales, finance, as well as product and engineering. Reducing the friction across these teams is really critical, particularly within many different subprocesses like configure, price and quote, the CPQ process which has friction, potential friction, or inefficiencies with dependencies on product catalog, pricing logic from the billing and version control issues. Then you start getting into the contract and deal close process, which has potential frictions when it comes to the manual approvals and inconsistent commercial terms and no standardized billing triggers.

If you're using usage-based pricing, usage tracking becomes its own potential opportunity for friction because you have engineering bottlenecks. Engineering teams are involved here when it comes to tracking the usage of your customers, potential lag in usage ingestion, which leads to incomplete or incorrect data.

Then next the finance team takes over with the billing and invoicing process, which needs to be connected to the CPQ or the contract or the contractual terms. Oftentimes it's not today, right? We're trying to extrapolate from a contract manually into a financial system or a, or, or a billing system in order to avoid errors and misaligned invoices, truly not able to achieve that automated standpoint of getting contract into bill.

And then for CFOs, near and dear to my heart personally, is revenue recognition. All of the complex rules from a ASC 606 or IFFR 15, depending upon where you are in the world. Manual journal entries on the backend and lack of real time visibility which leads to error prone spreadsheets and delay in business decisions.

Finally, collections and accounts receivable becomes part of the order-to-cash process on the backend. And without automation with disconnected systems, we have the ever present danger of high DSO and disconnected payment systems, or no real dunning process, no automated re reminders or workflows. And then the last process to touch here on order-to-cash gets us into reporting and forecasting.

We, we, we have potential friction areas when it comes to data silos across CPQ billing, ERP, CRM, so many different systems that touch this process or could touch this process and eventual delays in reporting and up to the board and up to management and limited ability to accurately forecast.

We are working here with the most critical process to maximize and report revenue correctly, but also critically to maintaining free cash flow. You, when, when we deal with the private equity firms and the venture capital firms on the back end, free cash flow is on the tip of their lips at all times. How are you maintaining and growing free cash flow to be able to, to, to be able to support yourselves ongoing year, two years, five years into the future?

Accurately and timely measurement of all of these KPIs allows companies to make better decisions when it comes to analyzing trends and adjusting their revenue growth strategies in real time.

The connection between the front end promises made in the sales process toward the backend reality of customer success brings the discussion into the GDR and NDR KPIs as well. Now we're talking retention. A frictionless process through the front end of the sales process bolsters a company's ability to set expectations properly and maintain their high ratios around retention. GDR and NDR are always critically looked at to a company's valuation and really to the future ability to do what they're doing today.

And finally, through actual full automation and scalable and and scalability in order-to-cash companies can avoid the pitfalls of revenue leakage. Missed opportunities for billing, upsell, and renewals are one of the most common but unacceptable areas for lost revenue. This is where you have contractual terms with your customers, leading you to a conclusion that you can make a million dollars and you're only billing and collecting $750k.

This is a nightmare for for, for order cash process. And it's a very real circumstance. A lot of the customers that we work with come to us saying, we don't even know how to build this piece, so we're currently not doing it.

These days there's so many best in breed point solutions to solve the siloed problems that it's really easy to pick and choose top priorities and biggest return on investment. But what you end up with here is a long-term tech debt and either siloed systems that don't speak to each other, or integrations that are costly and complicated.

Additionally, a tech stack with many best in breed tools can often lead to unclogged and uncategorized risk. Reporting to the board and funders can often lead to many different answers to the same question because everybody, everybody throughout the organization is maintaining their own point solution, which are disconnected. So they have their own answers to the same KPIs, the same metrics, and the same questions from the board.

At the end of the day, the cost of these disparate systems can easily and quickly exceed the cost and time to invest in one or two key enterprise cloud platforms. This is our recommendation. This is what we see the best in breed companies that are getting the highest multipliers from their PE firms or upon exit from their PE firms.

The advent of usage-based billing for many industries, not just software, is becoming more commonplace, making order-to-cash automation even more complex.

Oftentimes, when we think of usage-based billing, we simply think it is price times quantity, which is very rarely the reality. The reality of usage-based billing looks more like tracked usage that needs to be mediated into many different buckets, based upon a set of metadata that's tracked separately.

So let's think simply of tracking the number of users that need to be billed, a number which fluctuates every week, every month, every year, potentially. Then beyond there, these users are performing different functions and have different levels of access into the system, which all impact the bucket that they belong to, eventually. Each bucket might have its own ramped pricing model, and some might even have minimums and maximums that need to be applied. Those maximums, if they're exceeded, could lead to penalties or balloon payments.

The one thing that holds true is that if you allow a sales team to dream up a way to sell something that is more easily positioned toward the end user, they're going to take advantage of it. They're going to do so. Sales teams love to find a way to position their product in a way that consumers can more easily justify it. So complex usage-based billing only gets more complex. And the advent of artificial intelligence in the marketplace is just going to take the high percentages that we saw previously on the last slide and grow them as more companies enter this ecosystem.

Virtually every artificial intelligence company that we're speaking to these days is basing their billing on many different types of usage tracking. This makes adoption seem easy and low investment at first, and then as business sees the value they use more and more. The model feeds into the psyche of being fairly billed for the actual usage that customers are getting from their tools. Indeed, in the end, basing pricing on usage leads to companies being continually confident that their expensive infrastructure costs are always covered.

But it does call on a need to encourage the highest level of product adoption, which will fuel innovation and development by the engineering teams. It's really a model that feeds itself and that encourages software companies and artificial intelligence companies in particular to do as much as they can in order to encourage adoption, usage, and continued bolstering of that usage throughout the organization into other teams.

Let's pause to take a look at how confident you all are at adopting AI into your systems and processes.

Kristin Todd: Let me read it to you all. How confident are you that your current systems can support AI powered decision making and analytics? Your choices are very confident, somewhat, not confident, and not a current focus.

Keith Goldschmidt: I love the very confident and somewhat confident CFOs here. It's impressive to be diving into artificial intelligence right away.

Awesome. So it looks like. The better majority are in the bucket of very confident or somewhat confident. I would say 60% fall into the more, more comfortable side of evaluating artificial intelligence tools and utilizing them within your tech stack, which is great.

Let's get into the impact that order-to-cash tech stack has on on your businesses, because it is huge, right? We just went through a lot of KPIs, key performance indicators, and a lot of metrics that are all really governed by the order-to-cash process and are heavily weighted towards how we're building and collecting revenue and nimbly making decisions to impact the future of that revenue in order to be able to adjust in real time.

Those KPIs, if we remember back to the rule of 40 from the earlier section, are the key KPIs that are measured in a business's valuation, not just by the private equity firms, but also upon acquisition, also upon funding, even by banks. The same due diligence is being done on these particular KPIs, which are governed heavily by order-to-cash automation.

So as it pertains to profitability, how does the automation of the order-to-cash process really impact these critical key performance indicators and metrics used to gauge a business's valuation? Lifetime value or LTV to cost to customer acquisition cost or CAC is a critical part of any recurring business.

The initial cost of acquisition really needs to be greater than the initial lifetime value of the customer. This is a really important point that I don't want to overlook. If your current value of that customer is not in excess of your cost of acquisition, your LTV to CAC is out of whack. But growing that difference between the initial stage into the future is where the real value driver is. This is about retention for long periods of time, and a model that allows you to generate more revenue from each customer over over the lifetime.

So that gets into NDR and GRR. So said another way. The costs that you actually spend obtaining your customers will exceed the value you are getting from that opportunity by automating repetitive tasks like quoting and invoicing. Cutting down the costs of these sales and marketing processes is critical to these ratios. Contract renewals and process and processing invoices should become low to no touch with this automation and the pitfalls of compliance and risk in the process are going to be eliminated.

Order-to-cash truly touches virtually every single metric that a business needs to optimize in order to be able to maximize exit value or acquisition value. Further, the time from acquisition to maximizing return on that investment by eliminating manual processes and duplicative efforts helps companies to realize the value they envisioned during their due diligence.

This is a map of the different types of systems typically involved in rebuilding a best in class order-to-cash system stack. Other options and tools are certainly available and newer tools that are built on artificial intelligence from the ground up are entering the marketplace. It's a little early for a lot of those tools to really be evaluated in terms of best in class class order-to-cash, the systems stack.

There's a real tongue twister, got me a little bit. But when I'm asked for my opinion as to what the ideal systems stack looks like with my personal 20 plus years concentrating on some form of revenue accounting and process and system transformation, this is what typically delivers the most transformative automation.

Take it for what it's worth. I don't profess to be independent in this regard, but there's a reason I work at Zone. I'll leave it at that. We'll, we'll see a little bit more about ZoneBilling in particular and what the benefits are of being able to have a couple big box major applications that are connected to each other, like the CRM CPQ on one side of the house and the ERP on the other side of the house.

There's a bunch of other vendors that, and, and other applications that fit in here and do need to be integrated. It does typically, through this model, avoid just the best in breed point solutions, where the major applications here are the CRM CPQ that's connected to the ERP and your billing and revenue process is all housed within the ERP and controlled by finance.

The integration tools that we see on the bottom here are in order to connect the CRM and CPQ tool into the ERP, the reason for middleware and iPaaS solutions is typically because that connection can, it is built when it's built properly from CPQ into ERP or CRM into ERP. These are the same system, they're Salesforce. Typically for 90% of the marketplace are, is a rather complex connection to build, which is why these middlewares and iPaaS solutions exist.

Data is king. Data is the foundation of everything. We hear it everywhere. We hear statements like, we'd love to optimize our tech stack, but our data just is not in a state to be able to make those changes right now, we can't make those decisions at the moment. Well, guess what else your data is likely not in a state for then? Delivering timely reporting to management and to the board, making good and quick business decisions, and really most importantly, minimizing revenue leakage in order to be able to maximize revenue attainment. The two tasks really shouldn't be seen as independent from one another, they should be one major lift for transformation to excellence as a business.

When data is preventing you from upgrading your tech stack or the tech stack is preventing you from upgrading your data. Both tasks need to be analyzed and determine what can be done at the same time in order to be able to advance our business decisions because pivoting from one revenue model to the other because of trends that you're seeing in the marketplace needs to be done based on real-time information that's coming out of the business. If you're doing this with a six month lag, and I know I'm being a little extreme here with the six month talk, but if you're doing this with a six month lag, you're probably already too late to make that pivot and your competitors have already done so. But not only that, you might be responding to a trend that is now superseded, that you need to be responding to the trend today in the in the marketplace.

So where order-to-cash data should live. Our perspective on this is that order-to-cash data, what we mean by this is customer data, billing and invoicing data and revenue recognition belongs in the ERP. Your financial data should be an output of the CRM and CPQ. We do see a lot of CRM systems and CPQ systems arguing that billing and revenue belongs in their application on a attached to the contract on the sales side.

From our perspective, the more effective means of doing so is actually to replicate the contract in the ERP and have the billing and revenue be an output from there. But let the sales team operate the governance of, and the, the rules regarding CRM CPQ, the go to market team in general should be. Operating on that side of the house. And then on the ERP side of the house should be the CFO's organization and all the financially relevant data, the billing and invoicing that's going out to your customers. The revenue that is getting recognized in our in our financials and in our reporting up to the board to make the best decisions.

Now that data can flow back to those in charge of go to market, and it should flow back to those in charge of go to market because executive alignment is a key strategy here, making sure that the CRO, I know that's not a position everywhere, but it's becoming more and more commonplace, but the person in charge of your go-to-market efforts is aligned with the CFO and that business decision making and the data that it's based upon is real time is critical to being able to make the right decision for the future of your business.

Some things to think about where your contract's stored, what's the approval process for a new contract? Where then are the renewals for those agreements done? Should they be opened back up to the sales team for renegotiation, or do you have some form of automatic uplift and contractual uplift that the renewals can be done without negotiation and through an auto renewal process? Then where is billing being generated out of? And, one of the most important areas is, where is the master master data maintained? This includes your item master and your customer master. Our recommendation tends to ensure data consistency across sales and finance. It it leads to an automated revenue recognition and compliance process. It streamlines renewal and upsell processes, and finally it reduces manual errors and improves reporting.

When we get into the evaluation and billing and of, of billing and revenue tools, this is where we are potentially a little bit more independent, but less independent. But things that you want to look for in a modern billing system. There are must haves, like your billing system, needs to handle complex revenue recognition.

We run into a lot of billing systems or customers who have a billing process, a lot of times it's custom and it's homegrown, that doesn't connect to revenue recognition and revenue recognition is being done on the backend based upon that billing through manual spreadsheets and potentially open to significant errors.

Complex revenue recognition like ASC 606 is a must have. It must support advanced rating, data mediation, and orchestration. Again, I explained data mediation earlier through one of the most complex models when I talked about usage-based billing that is ramped and it needs to be bucketized, and that has minimum and maximum thresholds. We're seeing it more and more in the ecosystem, and the complexities are not going away. They're not becoming less. It's very rare that we actually run into a company that's just p times Q equals the invoice amount.

You, your, your billing system must feed cleanly into your GL. There can't be duplication and, and customer item records that become extrapolated into into the thousands because of little tweaks. Your billing system needs to be able to take con, consume those customer and item records, and properly map them in so you can deal with on the customer side, parent-child relationships, grandparent relationships, sometimes a bill to and a ship to that are different from each other. And item records that can be sold at many different levels.

It has to not only con feed cleanly into your gl, but connect seamlessly to your CRM, your CPQ and your ERP. And then finally, siloed data is the nightmare we've been talking about all along. That does not enable real time BI tools and AI tools that really lead to poor and delayed business decision making.

So question to ask yourself, can your billing system evolve with your pricing model and your customer lifecycle? If the answer to this is no, we would recommend going into a, an evaluation process for modernized the billing system. Alright, let's hop into a poll on billing system readiness.

Kristen, can you launch the poll please?

Kristin Todd: Which capability is most important to you when evaluating a new billing solution? Scalability for complex pricing and usage-based models. Native revenue recognition and compliance support. Seamless integration with GL and CRM CPQ systems, or Strong Data Foundation for AI powered insights.

Thanks so much for the speedy responses folks.

Keith Goldschmidt: Yeah, this is great. I love, I love what we're seeing. Seamless integration with GL and CRM CPQ systems leading the way by a country mile. I do see usage-based billing being alluded to multiple times. That's a that's second, but definitely seamless integration is critical.

Where we're, we're seeing as the results are really heavily weighted on the seamless integration with the GL. And then faster business decision making was pretty important to you all as well.

So a little bit about Zone, who we are, why we're here talking about order-to-cash, the the order-to-cash process. Zone has been in the ecosystem for, since, since 2013 leading the way when it comes to billing and revenue. We have been. One, one of our global themes as a company is to be a native application within the NetSuite application. So we are advocates and we, we really believe that the best process out there from an ERP perspective is typically NetSuite. And when complexity comes into play on the order-to-cash process, ZoneBilling is a great tool to deal with that we like to call ourselves a true enterprise billing tool. And I think that the functionality proves out to be, so if you want to learn more, we can certainly have that conversation.

But a true enterprise billing tool, which is exposed less to the general ecosystem than it should be because of the nature of Zone and what we do natively within NetSuite. So we have zero customers who are not NetSuite customers. ZoneBilling is built 100% within the ERP application. It's part of the reason that we tout and continue, continue to expound the benefits of being a native application and in, in including order-to-cash and including the entire billing process within the ERP.

We believe that this is the solution to leading to these most transformative processes that truly automate your subscription consumption and service billing directly inside of your ERP. So that billing is speaking to revenue automatically. The records are related to each other. They are generating each other.

The difference is that billing should, that, that billing and revenue are the output of a contract, right? Revenue should not be the output of the billing at the end of the day, because when revenue is the output of billing, it matches the cash transaction rather than the actual contractual transaction. That is a nightmare when it comes to compliance with as ASC 606.

So what we do is we solve challenges with faster billing and reduced DSO. We have quicker revenue recognition because we're working directly with the NetSuite R module. We are making the NetSuite R module better at what it does by getting total contract value onto a single revenue element and revenue plan, and able to adjust midterm when we have changes to those contractual obligations. Usage calculations are our bread and butter. Our rating engine is deal deals with the highest complexity. And then finally, we do have SOC 2 compliance. So when we speak to the CFOs who are evaluating these tools, we love to tout that we have the accountants and the auditors in mind.

When I say that we're built natively, this is not something that should be taken lightly and it shouldn't be tongue in cheek. A lot of companies will talk about how they are built for a particular application and built natively for that application, but the true underlying architecture is outside. And whether that be a native integration that they built for, for their tool or whether they're using some kind of middleware, there is an integration behind the scenes that's going on that is at risk to break.

When we build our, when we build ZoneBilling for NetSuite, it is 100% on NetSuite records within the Oracle framework of tools. And a lot of our customers, after going through an implementation, don't actually know where the NetSuite record ends and the ZoneBilling record picks up and begins. But what we're able to bring into the wheel and the house in the ERP is the entire process for order-to-cash. Lead to revenue exists still more on the CRM side. I'm sorry, lead to lead to contract exists still more on the CRM side. But then we will replicate the contract that's being created within the CRM in your ERP because, as I said, from that contract, you need to decouple the billing and the revenue process. So it is a circle, but that circle has a couple different offshoots.

Through the Zone API we're connecting, we are connecting to the CRM and CPQ, and we're connecting to the consumption of wherever usage data is being tracked.

We talked a lot about these usage-based billing models, when we started out earlier on in the presentation, and you'll see a lot of them laid out here in different bullets. When it comes to the tiered usage, the minimum commitments, the overages and balloon payments on the bottom row there, you see the data mediation, which is the, in my mind, the most critical box that we're showing here, but then areas that you have to deal with in order to be able to say any way you bill, we can to. Things like prepaid subscription and prepaid usage are challenges for the most tenured billing models out in the marketplace. Evergreen contracts and auto renewals and, and, and uplifts related to those related to those evergreen agreements are critical. And being able to automate that revenue potential, loss of revenue leakage that we were talking about earlier is how we're making a difference. And the billing system is paying for itself, delivering high ROI.

So the seamless order-to-cash revenue process. As I mentioned before, with high ROI is delivering a ton of operational value. It leads to faster close cycles, more ana, more analyses, and better data on the backend, that leads to better decision making.

We're typically reducing billing time by 50% to 80% and reducing your day sales outstanding and increasing your cash flow. So free cash flow is the game at the end of the day. This is the one, one of the most key metrics to the private equity firms and to the valuation of organizations.

And then finally, the strategic value is empowering your go-to market teams with the data and flexible pricing schedules to drive better revenue, get more visibility into your into your retention metrics. And at the end of the day, increase customer satisfaction, which leads to better retention metrics.

This is my final side for today. What a Zone offer we have we, we have 16 different software offerings. The common theme between each one of these is that they're all native applications built within NetSuite. We believe this is our superpower. We also believe that NetSuite shouldn't be called an ERP any longer. It should be called an enterprise cloud platform because you can build virtually anything for the office of the CFO natively. And all of these applications can speak to each other, delivering the most astute knowledge and timely information into the hands of the decision makers that need to be able to pivot and take the business in a different direction, take sales in a different direction, product and engineer some game changing tools that will lead us into the future of of this organization.

We have over 4,000 customers globally and over a decade of experience working in NetSuite and in finance in particular. I apologize that there's only four minutes left in this presentation at this point for questions and answers, but I'm really happy to answer anything that pops up at this juncture.

Kristin Todd: Thank you so much, Keith. Yeah, we, we do have a few minutes left, so I'm gonna dive right into the Q&A, if that's okay?

Keith Goldschmidt: Yeah, please.

Kristin Todd: Alright, first question that came in. What are common OTC breakdown points when companies scale from $50M to $200M+ in revenue?

Keith Goldschmidt: Yeah,  $50M to $200M+ in revenue is that juncture of we need to, we, we need to do something to transform and automate our order and cash process as soon as possible.

That, that is the juncture. If you're getting beyond $200 million in, in revenue recurring, and you haven't done this yet, the time is now to pick up the phone and think about it because the, the, the cost is only going to grow. But the most common breakdown points that we see in, in, at that scale is disconnected systems, disparate systems that don't talk to each other and come to different conclusions.

We, we, we see a lot of companies where the head of go to market is going to the board of directors with a different answer than the CFO. This can be a real nightmare and it can prevent scaling. It can also prevent funding when you need it, both from the banks and the venture and the venture firms and private equity.

Kristin Todd: Hmm, great, great perspective there. And speaking of scaling, next question fits right in what kind of tech stack decisions help or hurt OTC scalability?

Keith Goldschmidt: Yeah, I, I alluded to it earlier, but I think this is a great question. I think, I think best in breed point solutions. Can really be a nightmare when it comes to order-to-cash scalability. Best in breed point solutions, meaning we're going to choose a tool for Dunning; we're going to choose a tool for billing; we're going to choose a tool for revenue.

Now, every one of these becomes a little bit of a challenge at a different juncture in your growth as a company. So the temptation is just to say, this is where most of our pain right now is. And to do the order-to-cash Big Bang transformation is going to be incredibly painful. And we might not have the resources in the company right now to be able to handle it.

So we're going to choose revenue, which is our immediate pain point, and we need to solve this without a doubt, but it ends up becoming a, a, a, a negative point to make future decisions because a real close follow when you transform revenue is to transform billing.

And then you're stuck at a point where you have to choose something that works with that revenue process or back to the first question, you have those disconnected systems that don't talk to each other and lead to and, and lead to different conclusions.

Kristin Todd: Mm. Fantastic. Well, we are rounding up to the top of the hour, so I'm gonna squeeze one more in and I'm still curious to hear what your answer is to this one.

What's one thing you wish every finance team did before implementing automation? Where's the pain points there?

Keith Goldschmidt: Yeah, absolutely. I think one I, I think every finance team needs to take into consideration their organization and the ability to manage the data on the backend, I would say. But what one team, that's very critical and it can be housed within different areas, but finance tends to be a really nice place for this team to sit is a business applications team.

Somebody to administer and take over ownership of the applications post go live. I think we run into way too many finance teams who are, who say, okay, we have these three people who are billing and revenue accountants and they're going to work on this kind of transformation, but they don't think about the post go live.

They don't think about the administration of the tools. So think about the organizational change that's coming and change management. That's really critical to any business transformation.

Kristin Todd: Hmm, priceless, priceless perspective. Thank you so much Keith. Unfortunately, we are officially out of time, so any last words before we wrap things up?

Keith Goldschmidt: Just thank you so much to the CFO Leadership Council. You know, if you are coming to Austin this fall, find Chad, my, my colleague who is Zone's CFO, and please go see his presentation. It's really refreshing to be able to speak to this audience.

Kristin Todd: Yes, I couldn't agree more. So again, thank you all so much for connecting with us today.

This does conclude today's presentation. Until next time, stay well, stay cool, and of course, stay connected. Thanks again, Keith.

Keith Goldschmidt: Awesome. Thank you so much.