Scaling Finance Without Adding Headcount: Benevity’s Quote-to-Cash Transformation with ZoneBilling

Finance leaders can’t afford to let manual billing, scattered data, and delayed revenue recognition slow growth. In this webinar, discover how Benevity— a global leader in corporate giving software—automated quote-to-cash inside NetSuite with ZoneBilling.

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Hear directly from Benevity, alongside Hg Capital and Zone & Co, as they share how Benevity:

• Eliminated 30+ hours of manual billing work per week and reduced errors
• Streamlined AR to achieve their lowest-ever overdue receivables
• Closed the books 1–1.5 days faster with automated revenue recognition
• Scaled through M&A and rapid growth without adding headcount
• Strengthened compliance and audit readiness with ASC 606 built-in

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Transcript

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Eliot Cohen
Well, hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. We are really excitedto talk about how Benevity transformed billing and revenue with ZoneBilling. Wewill get right into it.

So to start off, let us talk about who your hosts are for today. I willintroduce myself quickly, and then Don and Lance, I will ask you to bothintroduce yourselves as well. My name is Eliot Cohen. I am a Private EquityLead at Zone & Co.

So we have a partnership with Hg Capital. We work closely with Anne andJames and Reeja, supporting several portfolio companies at Hg with oursolutions. And I will not talk too much during this call about us. We want thisto be more about Benevity and their journey with ZoneBilling.

But at Zone & Co, we make software solutions that sit on top of NetSuiteto extend and enhance your ERP. So we have solutions in the order-to-cashspace, AP automation, procure-to-pay, record-to-report, and beyond. So if youneed help with extending and enhancing your ERP, we are the ones to talk to.But we are really excited today to talk about our advanced subscription billingsolution with Don and Gil from Benevity.

So, Don, could you introduce yourself quickly for the group?

Don Gill
Of course. Yes.
My name is Don Gill. I am the Order-to-Cash Manager here with Benevity.

For those that do not know Benevity, we are a global goodness softwareprovider, essentially managing the charitable giving for our clients and theiremployees, allowing them to donate to causes that resonate and speak to them.Like this month, November. It is Movember, so that is a cause that reallyresonates with me.

It allows your employees to go into our website, into our software, donateto that cause, and get matching by the clients as well. So we have worked witha lot of the Fortune 500 companies, allowing them to get away from working onspreadsheets and manual tax processing. We take care of that through Benevityand our foundation partners. So, yeah, that is a little bit about me andBenevity. I will pass it over to Lance now.

Lance Ludman
Thanks, Don. Lance Ludman. I have been the CFO here at Benevity for almost afull 3 years.

And as Don said, it is a company that has this dual bottom-line focus, bothdelivering for our shareholders and investors, but also delivering goodness toour thousands of clients. We have been part of the Hg portfolio since about2021.

And I would say the last 2 years especially, we have been on this journey oftransforming our overall processes and systems across the company. And thispiece that we are going to talk about today is one of the most important piecesof that transformation.

Eliot Cohen
Awesome. Thanks, Don. Thanks, Lance.

So let us get into it. We have a short but packed agenda today. We are goingto talk just a little bit more about Benevity as an organization and as abusiness. We will rewind the clock and talk a bit about the challenges thatwere persisting as we set off on this journey. We will talk about thesolutions, options, selected solutions, and implementation of said solutions.And then the exciting bit is where we will talk about the impact and the valuethat we created as a result of this journey.

So that is the agenda. I am going to kind of emcee the discussion here,really lean on Don and Lance to tell the story. I will ask some questionsthroughout, but we really want this to be kind of informal, educational.

So if folks on the call have questions, please kind of raise them up in someway, shape, or form. If you can come off mute and just interject, that istotally fine. If you want to use the chat, we will have someone to monitorthat. But we want this to be a collaborative, knowledge-sharing type of format.So we will get into it and keep it informal as we go.

Cool. So, Don, Lance, you talked a little bit about Benevity at a highlevel. But maybe if you could talk a little bit more about the business, howyou are set up, how you go to market, the product that you sell, and thestanding of the organization, perhaps looking a little bit back and thenforward into the future about where you want to go.

Lance Ludman
Yeah. I will take that one first, Don.

So, as it says here, about 1,000 employees. Think of it as roughly 1,000clients mostly focused on the Fortune 2,000 across the globe, and I would saythat our competitive differentiator is we have global solutions. Most of thecompanies we work with are multinational companies. If you think about theprofile of the revenue of the company, we are a SaaS software company.

About 55% of our revenue is recurring ARR contracts, and then about 40% ofour revenue is the transaction fees that we collect when we move eitherdonations or grants from our clients to the causes that they choose to donateto. So that is the basic model.

And if you think about our go-to-market, our approach is very much a directenterprise sales model. So land and expand. We are trying to land in our targetmarkets—these companies—usually with a giving solution, sometimes with agranting solution, and then we are consistently selling back to base in termsof some of the features and the managed services that we can provide aroundthat.

When we land the clients and they come into the ecosystem, typically theytake about 12 to 15 months to get up to full course and speed in terms of usingthe fundraising pieces of our solution. And so that becomes revenue thatusually has a longer tail. But once it is completely on the system, we aretypically growing with our clients as their gifts and their philanthropycontinue to grow.

That initial billing, if you will, as we get to the topic today, and thenthe ability to renew those clients, which we typically renew at a pretty highrate—our logo retention is about 96.5%. Our overall revenue retention from aGRR perspective is in the low 90s.

Eliot Cohen
That is awesome. Don, anything that you would want to add just from yourperspective?

Don Gill
No. I think that was a great intro for sure. Lance is super eloquent in termsof describing our business there.

From the operational lens here, what we are speaking through today is theBenevity subscription side of the business. The other 45%, that transactionalfee, that is separate from the discussion we will have here today. We havefoundation partners that take care of that side of the business. So we will behoning in on the subscription and the setups and the managed services that weprovide, and that is the transformation we will be speaking to here today.

Eliot Cohen
Awesome. Great stuff.

Okay. So let us get into some of those challenges. If we rewind the clock alittle bit before you set off on this journey with us and ZoneBilling, what wasgoing on? Talk to us about the challenges, whether around manual interventionrequired for different touch points through the customer journey, compliancerisks, or just hindrances that you were observing that you wanted to resolve.

Lance Ludman
Don, maybe I will start at the top and then you can go into some detail. As abusiness, cash matters. We do not have a particularly large debt load, but inour business, if you think about giving across the globe, we are in the middleof what we like to think of as busy season.

Most charitable giving happens in November and December. You have thingslike Don mentioned—Movember. You have Giving Tuesday, which is now a globalphenomenon, taking place this year on December 2. And in many countries,especially the United States, a lot of giving happens in the last week of theyear, and it is tax incentivized.

So if you think about that 45% of our revenue and the cash we collect fromthat, that is loaded toward the months of November, December, January, andFebruary, which means we have a cash deficit the rest of the year.Traditionally, we relied on a revolver facility to allow us to manage cash flowmore evenly.

The challenge when I arrived 3 years ago, and certainly in the first yearand a half, was that we had very sporadic cash flow. It did not align with therhythm of the business. I could not understand why cash collections were solight in some months when they should have been heavy, and vice versa.

When you dig into it, like many companies, we were not managing a consistentprocess, and we did not have the tools because it was a very manual processthat we were sitting over. If we think about the big challenges:

Why does my cash flow not align to my EBITDA?

Why do we have so many clients—greater than 90 days late in collections?

One year ago, we would have had 13% of our total AR balance greater than 90days late, and that was persistent. So Don and I teamed up, trying to managethis, and maybe you pick up the story from there.

Don Gill
Okay. Yeah.

Manual process was the name of the game when we look back even 2 years ago.The order-to-cash transformation really started from moving our renewalsprocess from spreadsheets into CPQ, equipping our sales team with the righttools upfront so they have discussions with clients well in advance of arenewal. That was a big piece for us.

A part of our business has annual renewals. So typically there is a renewalsfunction, negotiations on price uplift based on our pricing structure. Thatdelays the renewal process, then delays invoicing, then delays cash flow.

Moving this to CPQ was a big first step. At the same time, we moved toNetSuite. And the last piece was bringing in ZoneBilling to ensure consistencyof data between systems.

Removing manual data entry was a big part. Equipping our sales team with CPQhelped. We have a deal desk function now to ensure clean data from CPQ, andZone was able to unlock reducing manual entry.

Now we have systems that speak the same language—same products, sameclients. We have that same data, and now we are automating our ARR. It is thatlast step. We have consistency of data and information needed to see howsuccessful our business is and to have that look ahead, which is crucial forour CFOs such as Lance.

Then on the revenue recognition side, we had a bumpy process due to manualprocesses—lots of ins and outs, credit memos, renegotiations. We have worked onupstream processes over the last 2 years to ensure clean data, early clientconversations. When it comes to cash, we have reduced friction and noise.

The gains from ZoneBilling allowed us to focus on making sure we get thatcash.

Eliot Cohen
That is awesome. You set the stage nicely.

I love how you painted the picture of looking at order to cash holistically.We will talk about ZoneBilling as that advanced subscription engine as a pieceof the transformation. But it sounds like before putting in solutions acrossthe value chain, it was disjointed and required manual intervention. We willtalk about how you solved those challenges.

But thinking about these programs holistically from order to cash and tryingto streamline and connect it is so important.

Follow-up question: when it was so disjointed and required manualintervention, I am assuming compliance risk was a definite challenge. Theability to audit and report on what was going on throughout the business. Isthat fair?

Don Gill
Oh, for sure it was.

Again, it was manually going through those 606 requirements, nonstandardcontracts. Nonstandard contracts were common as well. We are in a high-growthphase, and when Lance came on board, he did a great job of standardizingcontracts, pricing terms, and eliminating nonstandard items that delayedsubscription and delayed implementation.

That gave us quality data from the start. We could start recognizing revenuefrom day one. That was a big improvement. Making sure clients have access tosite keys—the engine, so to speak. That was time-consuming.

Now our revenue recognition is automated through our processes and itemsetup. It has reduced friction with our revenue accountant, and now it is moreabout analysis and spotting outliers instead of manual release of revenue.

Lance Ludman
Yeah. I might double-click on something Don said because it was important.

Fortune 2,000 clients—very demanding. As a small company that grew quickly,sometimes we were oversympathetic to client needs. In a lot of our contracts,we did not have standard SaaS processes for revenue recognition. That showedup.

I could not understand in the early days looking at deferred revenue—what isgoing on? Why is this not a straight line? Why are there so many pluses andminuses?

We were recognizing revenue when the client went live instead of when theybought, which made it difficult to standardize or use a tool. Just that obviousSaaS tactic of recognizing revenue by delivering value the day you sign thecontract smoothed out deferred revenue, and allowed us to optimize the process.

Eliot Cohen
Awesome. I want to stay true to giving folks opportunity to chime in.

I am curious if any of these challenges resonate with the group. Anne, Iwondered if you had any comments?

Anne Huemme
I do recognize that a lot of our portfolio companies do encounter maybe notall, but some of these challenges. So I think it is relevant.

Eliot Cohen
Great. Okay.

Well, with that in mind, these are the challenges.

Don Gill
To speak to the complex billing, some of that was contract driven. Some of thatis when dealing with large global clients—they have complex billingarrangements. Maybe it is staggered billing, billing to different entities.Maybe a foundation wants to share part of the cost, the corporation wantsanother portion.

There was a lot of manual work. In the past, there was a lot of manualediting: “Okay, Microsoft, we will send it to these 12 entities.” Very manual.It created complications with ARR reporting downstream.

Systems were not synced. Salesforce might say Client A, and then we haveClient A, B, C, D between systems. We cleaned this up. With tools andconnections, we are speaking the same language between systems.

James Cope
Yeah, well—

Anne Huemme
It is important to reiterate Lance’s point about not automating a bad process.Evaluate how you are contracting—pricing, bundling, discounts. Make sure youevaluate all your business, go-to-market, and contracting processes before andduring implementations to accelerate value.

Lance Ludman
Great point. Having a deal desk—formal or informal—to maintain contractconsistency is crucial.

James Cope
There is a tipping point where businesses shift from simple to complex. One ofthe consequences is in billing. If you do annual billing and have a handful ofproducts, you can manually enter them.

The moment your go-to-market motion includes co-terming, amendments, etc.,the scale grows dramatically. You could do it manually, but not with the samesmall team. The right time to put in a solution is before you hit thatcomplexity.

Eliot Cohen
Yeah. Great point. Thinking about processes and matching them to strategy iscritical. And having the tech in place to support those processes is the nameof the game.

Great segue into the next slide—solutions that were considered. First wecompare doing nothing or using NetSuite out of the box versus using an advancedsubscription engine like ours.

With native NetSuite, contract amendments require manual intervention,keying in changes into the ERP. With ZoneBilling, we flip that on its head andautomate, connecting CPQ to ERP.

With complex billing schedules, native flexibility is limited, often trackedoffline. With ZoneBilling, you have automated scheduling for anyfrequency—usage, one-time, tiered pricing.

Multiyear agreements are difficult out of the box. ZoneBilling automatesrevenue recognition aligned to performance obligations for the full term.

On invoicing—getting accurate, consolidated invoices without customizationis not really possible. We automate this.

Billing to multiple parent-child entities in different ways is challengingnatively. We support true parent-child hierarchy syncing from CRM to ERP.

Revenue recognition is manual without an advanced tool. With ZoneBilling,everything is broken out, works with ARM and multi-book, automating the logic.

Don, Lance—anything you want to comment on?

Don Gill
Yes. Taking the lead here—contract amendments are something we see frequently.You are upselling clients constantly. We co-mingle and prorate to renewal.There can be five different subscriptions added during the year—volunteering,forms, managed services, one-time fees, subscriptions.

Monitoring all that using sales orders was clunky. Now we have one-to-onesubscription match between Salesforce and NetSuite aligned to renewal. Allrevenue recognition is set up. It is smooth.

On multiyear agreements—something we push with clients. With ZoneBilling, itis set it and forget it. When it is time to bill, reporting in NetSuite alertsus. Revenue profiles are set based on SKUs. Automation posts according to 606and releases at the right time.

Those are the three biggest standouts.

Eliot Cohen
That is awesome.

Lance Ludman
On multi-years: when we started, less than 5% of our revenue was multiyear. Nowwe are tracking toward 30 and on the way to 50. We got lucky here—manual wouldbe impossible as this becomes the majority of the business.

Eliot Cohen
Great. To James’s point, great that you got ahead of it. Anything else to callout?

Anne Huemme
A statement more than a question—one thing I see with less-than-standardbilling practices is high occurrence of credit memos. NetSuite is unforgivingwhen you amend a sales order or rev rec schedule. Curious if you have seen areduction?

Don Gill
Yes. In terms of dollar value, we reduced credit memos from 10% to 2%. Upstreamprocesses helped—renegotiating earlier, deal desk, clean data. Manual entryreduction also helped.

Eliot Cohen
We will come back to more outcomes—that was a good teaser.

Anne Huemme
Okay, good.

Don Gill
Another thing—bill-to addresses and complexity of clients. Rather than manualworkarounds, we put upstream processes in place to flag anythingnonstandard—multiple entities, etc. Customer hierarchy and master data—who arewe sending this to, contacts, addresses—having consistency helps.

Eliot Cohen
Yes, connectedness. Tracking upstream flags and ensuring billing flowscorrectly is critical. Without the right plumbing, it falls flat. Great point.

Don Gill
Another constant pain point is purchase orders. Not having a PO delayscollections. One thing we did in Salesforce is flag clients requiring a PO sothe sales team incorporates this early. Otherwise enterprise clients delay30–60 days.

Anne Huemme
And it cannot get marked to post unless that PO is in the system.

Eliot Cohen
Great point. Our solution is embedded in ERP. We are talking with anorder-to-cash leader and CFO about back office, but the connection point andbenefit from go-to-market motions down through billing and rev rec is soprevalent.

Don Gill
And connecting tools and data forced the business to ask: How do we clean updata? How do we optimize the tool? How do we optimize Salesforce? Ensuring weall speak the same language, ensuring timely payment. Governance preventsmismatch between systems.

Eliot Cohen
Absolutely. Anything to add, Lance? Okay, cool.

Let us keep going. Now we segue into implementation.

About a 3–4 month phase. Don, what went into the implementation?

Don Gill
Yes, about 3–4 months. We contracted out backend implementation expertise.

We brought scenarios—hundreds—based on co-terming, revenue elements, producttypes. Ensured consistency of data. We have multiple entities and subsidiaries,so ensuring compliance across entities.

Aligning Salesforce and NetSuite—consistency of customer master data:parent, child, addresses, contacts.

On revenue recognition—matching products and SKUs one-to-one betweensystems. Salesforce was light before; now we have consistency. Less manualentry. SKUs aligned to revenue profiles.

We incorporated tax automation through Avalara and ensured clarity onproduct and revenue items.

We had heavy testing. Three to four months was short, but focus helped. Weused best practices for implementing ZoneBilling, upstream processes, and ARMwithin NetSuite for revenue automation.

Eliot Cohen
Amazing.

Lance Ludman
On creating a single source of truth across Salesforce and NetSuite—that lookslike a 3–4 month exercise, sounds easy, but it is not. It is painstaking. Thenumber of reviews—why is this data element different? Why is it not syncing?—itwas painful, but necessary.

Getting an outside consultant was critical so we could run and fix thebusiness at the same time.

Anne Huemme
Which of the three things took the most time—aligning data, cleaning data, usecases?

Don Gill
Cleaning the data for sure.

Anne Huemme
Interesting.

Don Gill
We needed consistency between systems. In the past, Salesforce was used bysales, focused on closing deals, not data integrity. Accounting and financewould clean it up.

Having a deal desk helps ensure quality data. Governance—working with dealdesk daily, weekly, monthly ensures consistency. We ingest great data from theget-go. New products, SKUs, new clients—we ensure right information upfront.

Lance Ludman
Having sales, rev ops, deal desk, and finance all agree that “closed won” isactually closed won is key. Then data can be consumed cleanly for the nextstep.

Eliot Cohen
Congrats on the success. You delivered a lot in a short window.

One thing I want to comment on is that data cleanup will be necessary atsome point. By structuring processes and tech, ideally you do not have to do itagain for a long time. Now you are scalable.

Fair assessment?

Lance Ludman
Yes. Data cleansing is never done. New products, new clients—things change. Butthe Pareto principle applies. What is the critical mass—80%, 90%, 95%? Once youget there, everything gets easier each cycle.

Eliot Cohen
Awesome.

There are questions in the chat about contract amendments being one of thebiggest complexities and difficulty finding a solution that fits allrevenue/billing types.

Don, want to comment?

Don Gill
Yes, similar issues. We used Intacct before. We moved to NetSuite forfunctionality, multi-book, consolidation—it saved days in month-end.

Native NetSuite plus ZoneBilling helped with different product types,revenue types, billing types—even within a client. Some lines billed quarterly,others annually. ZoneBilling separates revenue recognition types and lets thesystem do the work.

Rather than spending a half hour, you spend a couple minutes setting it up.

Eliot Cohen
Yes—this is why ZoneBilling exists. Happy to chat more offline.

Another question—any reports to use for reconciling or investigatingoutliers?

Don Gill
We built reporting in NetSuite and Salesforce to reconcile subscription dataone-to-one and spot outliers. It is part of month-end. It typically takes 15–20minutes to see outliers.

Most of the time, it is an upstream issue, so we correct the behavior.

Lance Ludman
At the same time, we built a data cube to manage ARR trends. When we seesomething odd, it informs upstream investigation.

Anne Huemme
Depending on your system, there are tools—Quad AR connector, etc.—that can helpfind discrepancies automatically. Reach out if needed.

Eliot Cohen
Lingering on this—this implementation gave new data constructs and visibilityyou did not have before. Can you comment on impacts on analytics?

Lance Ludman
Reporting is much easier. We can report internally and to leadership quickly.

On analytics—downsells are harder to detect than churn. But with baselinedata across many clients and years, we can pinpoint better. Not perfect, but weknow where to look.

Eliot Cohen
Awesome.

Let us get to key outcomes.

Don?

Don Gill
Yes. Big things:

Reducing manual work by upwards of 30 hours a week. During renewal period,manual entry and validation were intense with our SKU list. ZoneBilling reducedthat.

Faster days to close—less manual invoicing, automated revenue recognition.We shift to analysis sooner.

Audit-ready compliance—much more confident in data and consistency acrosstools.

Shortening the OTC cycle—getting cash sooner. Ten-day reduction in DSO.Eliminated negotiation delays, PO delays.

Cash conversion—previously bumpy, now consistent. Hitting cash targetsmonthly. Shifting focus from manual work to collections.

This is huge in today’s environment.

Eliot Cohen
Absolutely.

Lance Ludman
The holy grail—consistent EBITDA-to-cash conversion. Previously we had 60%flow-through with unexplained hiccups.

Now we see operational leverage falling to cash predictably. Debt servicebecomes predictable. Capital deployment is more flexible.

Now, when I look at monthly reporting, I know what it will be before I seeit. It is comforting.

Eliot Cohen
Amazing.

Last slide—human impact.

Don?

Don Gill
Yes. With manual processes, there are redundant tasks and less visible value.Now shifting to reconciling outliers and focusing on cash, you can see thevalue month to month.

We even reduced headcount—a long-term contractor—due to reduced manual work.Despite that, morale improved. We can scale without adding headcount as we addproducts and services.

When we hit last year's renewal period, implemented right before it, theteam saw immediate impact—1,000 invoices easily processed. Big morale boost.

Looking back, the team has nothing but glowing reviews. Our work has shiftedto value-add activities—client work, sales support, reporting—rather thanmanual tasks.

Lance Ludman
Reluctant to add—Don said it perfectly. One thing: three years ago, I mighthave said I hope we acquire a company with a mature order-to-cash process. NowI would say the opposite—we would migrate an acquired company to our processwithin 3 weeks. That is how mature it is now.

Eliot Cohen
Amazing anecdote.

Anne Huemme
I observed deeper insights into what was happening behind the business. Withaccurate Snowball data, we realized different problems and could isolate exactproduct microfinance units. We now have a solid handle on the business, unlike18 months ago.

Eliot Cohen
Awesome.

Look at that—we are right on time.

Don, Lance—thank you for doing this today, for your trust, and congrats onthe success. This was a pleasure. Hopefully it was insightful for the audience.If folks have questions, please reach out.

Anne, Reeja, James—thanks for the partnership. Thank you all for joining.

Lance Ludman
Thanks, Eliot. Thanks, everybody.