Blackthorn uses Stripe integration to improve revenue management

“We now have detailed revenue data in our accounting system that we trust. Improved data has bolstered confidence from our investors and other departments within the organization. We spend less time questioning if the data is correct, more time analyzing it and deciding what decisions need to be made based on it.”

Erik Meyer, SVP Finance

The Challenge

Many businesses struggle with disjointed Financial Operations systems, leading to manual data transfer and entry between systems, burning precious hours in the process. The cost of disjointed systems include impact to team morale, opportunity cost of spending time on strategic direction of the company, and most importantly, regularly delaying reporting for management and shareholders. As we’ve seen from the latest earnings report errors, the accounting and finance department is overworked and struggling.

The highest performing finance teams follow below principles when it comes to their invoicing and revenue processes.

• Detailed tracking of revenue and ARR information. Real-time and holistic tracking of who’s paid, who’s not
• Flexibility in workflows, invoicing and accepting payment – every customer situation can be unique and finance teams want to support that
• Zero time spent on low-value added tasks: Cash reconciliation of fees, repetitive manual journal entries, manual invoice creation and sending and so on

The Solution

To offer customers accurate and real-time insights into their revenue, Rillet looked to Stripe Apps. Stripe Apps let companies like Rillet deeply integrate and extend Stripe products with their offerings. The Rillet app for Stripe is unique in that Stripe’s data is thoughtfully mapped against Rillet’s data syntax in an intuitive way for accountants. This enables finance teams to follow their natural processes and have the Rillet app to support their natural workflows that make sense for accounting and finance versus having to adjust their process to fit the tooling or integration shortcomings. “What I like about the Rillet app for Stripe is that it’s built for that purpose. The Stripe integration came natively by using Rillet, so it's already form-fitted for the system and works perfectly well“, says Danny Meyers, VP of Finance at Convictional.

There is flexibility in mapping the data fields between Stripe and Rillet. For example, Blackthorn is able to track fields beyond the regular start and end dates of subscriptions, products and invoice dates. “Rillet pulls in Stripe invoicing and metadata, which is matched against contracts pulled into Rillet from our CRM. After data has been ingested from both systems, we are able to confirm contract details and run reports in Rillet that reconciles all invoices generated out of Stripe to ensure they have a matching contract in Rillet.”

The integration between Stripe and Rillet operates in real-time. All of the Stripe objects are clickable in Rillet which allows customers to easily drill into the underlying data in Stripe, easily toggling back and forth between systems. It allows for really clean reporting, Erik from Blackthorn points out “with clean revenue data, we spend 2 less days per month preparing external reporting as there is no longer the need to sanitize revenue data.”

Lastly, payment, refund, void, and fee information directly syncs from Stripe into Rillet. This saves accountants hours reconciling systems and bank accounts. Erik estimates “that the Stripe integration with Rillet saves us 3 days in our close cycle as it has streamlined the most complex piece of our business.”

The Results

With the Rillet app, teams save significant time on mundane reconciliation work and deliver next-level reporting to the whole organization in real-time. For Blackthorn, the integration saved

• 5 days every month and allow for higher value work
• High trust in the numbers
• More insight for the wider team for more reporting flexibility and better ability to forecast