Results with Tesorio include:

• Improved DSO by 20% within three months

• Cured a backlog of 24- to 36-month-old invoices

• Increased and optimized collections outreach

Before joining Apptio two years ago as Senior Manager over the Revenue and Accounts Receivable team, the now Director of Revenue Accounting and Accounts Receivable, spent the bulk of her career managing Revenue Accounting teams and working in Auditing, where a consistent level of daily revenue is the norm. As a SaaS-based company that helps customers analyze and optimize their IT Spend, Apptio works differently. It invoices customers annually in advance of their contracts, typically for high-dollar amounts. So, instead of daily or weekly small-dollar payments continually feeding revenue, Apptio’s cash flow depends on its contracts and customer relationships.

Lack of insight impacted workload planning

The globally situated AR team tracked everything in a spreadsheet, which created a constantly moving target with everyone updating at different times. As a result, it was challenging for the team to focus their time and efforts on following up with the customers.

This setup also impacted the Director of Revenue Accounting and AR’s ability to provide executive leadership with a cash forecast that she could be confident in and within their expected turnaround time. On top of that, it was difficult to communicate collections progress with sales and other departments as well as for them to communicate customer health checks with finance.

AR team experiences triple lift with workflow obstacles eliminated

Without the ability to measure or prioritize the AR workload, the team wasn’t focusing on the highest value invoices. This was the first obstacle that Tesorio eliminated. “It helped me provide structure to the team.” The platform’s dashboard lets team members see the information they need to effectively do their jobs. They’re now self-sufficient in prioritizing and managing their workloads in favor of multi-million-dollar invoices over small-dollar ones, which significantly improves cash flow.

In addition to bringing in more cash to the business on a consistent basis, the AR team has experienced a big morale boost. Frustration over lack of control in their jobs was an added drag on productivity. Now, the AR team has “a tool that lets them have ownership over their workload.”

The Director of Accounting and Accounts Receivable, can set up reporting to automatically email her team a list of outstanding invoices, which are then discussed in their one-on-one meetings. Tesorio helped streamline key processes and helped the team be more self-sufficient.

More productive conversations with leadership emerge with Tesorio’s help

Prior to Tesorio, coming up with a forecast was difficult and time consuming, a literal line-by-line exercise trying to figure out which customers were going to pay and when. But today, Apptio’s Accounting and AR team is able to quickly and accurately forecast the cash runway for leadership at any time.

Plus, they have the reporting to back up all their explanations regarding collections. If a senior leader asks about a particular customer’s invoice, they can check its real-time status on their Tesorio dashboard and see everything that’s been done to date because it’s all been recorded in one central location.

Sales and finance are now on the same page

Integrating Tesorio with Salesforce has resolved the friction between AR and sales because they can now easily share information about invoices, current collection efforts, payments, contract negotiations, and customer discussions.

Tesorio eliminated another pain point for both AR and sales: the lack of an effective dunning process and the inability to easily change automated dunning messages when needed. “Before Tesorio, we weren’t able to be as proactive in reaching out to customers.” We had a system-automated email that was not flexible to change. “Tesorio has a flexible collections campaign that allows us to customize and change our messaging more often or as needed.”

It’s the difference between night and day

When she first arrived at Apptio, the now Director of Accounting and AR wanted to get an efficient collections process in place, and after implementing Tesorio, they were able to come up with a game plan to make collections not only efficient, but extremely effective. AR team members now have a tool that helps them prioritize invoices appropriately, while leadership has the reporting and metrics to track AR outcomes, calculate accurate cash forecasts, and balance their time between AR and revenue.

“We’re growing so fast, and we needed a place to organize all of this data.” Tesorio was the answer. It’s improved the Apptio team’s conversations and relationships with business partners by making them more transparent and productive.