Background

PlayMetrics helps youth sports organizations conquer the chaos of their daily operations so they can provide the best possible experience to their members. PlayMetrics’ software handles everything from building a website to organizing teams to collecting registration fees, all in a single, easy-to-use platform.

As CFO and COO at PlayMetrics, Chris Smith is responsible for all aspects of finance, human resources, and revenue operations at the company. Along with Devin Downey, Director of Analysis, who manages billing and invoicing, the two were looking for a solution to tackle billing, collections, and financial reporting, which had been built over time across a variety of different tools. “We needed less manual entry, reduced potential for error, more systematic approval processes, and less time consumed doing menial tasks,” explained Smith. As the business was expanding rapidly, Smith and Downey knew that their existing technology and processes weren’t going to scale.

Manual Processes Were a Risk and Ate Up Valuable Time

Prior to Subskribe, billing a customer meant Downey needed to manually enter order data into QuickBooks to generate an invoice and set up reminders in order to know when to send the next invoices out at the right time. If any payments were late, he also needed to manually issue dunning emails. As PlayMetrics’ customer count continued to climb, this process became more and more cumbersome.

On the analysis side, Smith maintained his own Excel spreadsheet in order to keep track of standard SaaS metrics and KPIs like ARR, churn, and expansion. But this, too, could be susceptible to human error, and, on top of that, could fall out of sync with the billing side.

Legacy Billing Systems Lacked Flexibility and CPQ Capabilities

Many of PlayMetrics’ customers are on complex billing schedules, meaning it’s not all simple monthly or quarterly cadences, and some products include minimum commitments with overage fees. In order to accommodate these deal structures, Smith and Downey started looking into SaaS billing solutions.

They quickly found out, however, that many of the legacy billing providers couldn’t support the billing models that were critical for PlayMetrics’ customers. “Our deals are very much sales-led,” Smith said. “Very few billing systems can actually handle things like irregular cash collection cadences natively — or at all.”

While Smith and Downey evaluated legacy players like Ordway and Maxio, they were drawn to Subskribe and its full quote-to-revenue platform.
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“We were much more comfortable with Subskribe’s user interface and data model,” Smith said. “And while initially we weren’t expecting to tackle anything upstream of billing, when we saw the tightly integrated CPQ that Subskribe had, it made our decision easy.”

Subskribe’s Quote-to-Revenue Platform Provides a Seamless End-to-End Solution

While PlayMetrics initially came to Subskribe in need of a robust billing solution, Subskribe’s unified platform, which includes CPQ, billing, revenue recognition, and advanced analytics, gave the company an opportunity to address its entire quote-to-revenue stack. For Smith and Downey, it was clear that Subskribe’s offering solved not only the immediate problems of today, but also provided the extensibility and future-proofing that would pay dividends for years to come.

Subskribe provides PlayMetrics with:

• Clean, modern user interface that was a no-brainer to use. “The UI and the order entry process are really good and intuitive, even for our relatively complicated contract methods,” said Smith.
• Unified data model that flows from quote to order to invoice to revenue. “Without Subskribe, we would have had to build out our price book in CRM then bridge it to a billing system,” Smith explained. “This would have been a brittle solution, not to mention a ton of work.”
• Sophisticated approval workflow engine that brings structure to the quoting process and improves internal communication. “For example, having structured approval steps prior to an order getting to Legal is going to make their lives so much better,” commented Smith.
• Robust e-signature integration that streamlines the quote-to-signature process. “It’s amazing to see in action the flow between a salesperson entering a quote to the generation of a legal order that can be e-signed,” said Smith.
• Automated and accurate invoices that eliminate potential user error and significantly reduce manual work. “Manually typing in data for orders and invoices was inefficient and cumbersome for us, and was not going to keep up with growth in the business” explained Smith.