Don’t Wait for the Breaking Point: How Asana’s Finance Team Laid the Groundwork for Their Upmarket Shift
Every SaaS company hits an inflection point.
For work management platform Asana, it came when they saw rising enterprise demand, launched new AI products, and moved from single-product simplicity to a multiproduct, multimodal business. That’s when Sid Sanghvi, Head of Finance Business Applications, knew: the old systems weren’t going to cut it.
We made a very conscious effort to move upmarket, and with that came the realization—we needed a consolidated, enterprise-ready financial infrastructure.
– Sid Sanghvi
Head of Finance Business Applications
Asana’s story is a blueprint for what modern SaaS finance teams can—and must—do to scale from PLG to enterprise. If you’re a finance leader in SaaS, take a page from Sid’s playbook. Here are seven tips from Asana’s upmarket journey.
1. Spot the Inflection Point Before It Breaks You
The shift to enterprise sales doesn’t always come with a formal kickoff. More often, it sneaks up in the form of mounting complexity: multi-product catalogs, AI-based pricing, growing services revenue, global subsidiaries, and multi-year contract ramps.
“You hit a point where PLG tools just can’t scale anymore,” Sid notes. “If you’re adding services, layering in AI, or selling into multiple regions, you need to pivot to a platform that can support that before finance becomes a bottleneck.”
According to Zuora’s 2025 Modern Finance Leader Report, many SaaS companies may be waiting too long to future-proof their tech stack. 82% of SaaS finance leaders experienced O2C system breakdowns during their shift from PLG to enterprise sales. Asana, on the other hand, avoided that crisis by acting early.
2. Own the Stack and the Strategy
Too many SaaS companies treat financial systems as a patchwork of tools owned by IT, RevOps, or whoever was free at the time. But this only creates friction and limits Finance’s ability to adapt. Today, only 56% of SaaS leaders say their company has a dedicated finance systems team within finance. And 83% say fragmented O2C ownership creates significant operational challenges.
Sid’s team made a different choice: build a dedicated finance systems function within Finance and consolidate onto a single, usage-aware O2C platform. “Zuora has been the indispensable financial backbone that empowered Asana’s transition from PLG to enterprise,” he says. “It transforms your finance team from a reactive cost center into a proactive business enabler.”
Asana didn’t just replace tools. They shifted ownership and with it, strategic control.
3. Integrate, Don’t Abandon, Your PLG Motion
A key insight from Asana’s journey: PLG doesn’t go away when you add enterprise sales, it evolves into a powerful lead-gen engine.
“You cannot ignore your PLG motion just because you want to pivot to sales-led growth,” Sid emphasizes. “PLG is your lifeline for seeding accounts and getting product into hands. The real challenge is making PLG and enterprise work together in one system.”
For Asana, this integration became critical as they evolved from a single-product PLG model to a multi-product enterprise offering. “Your PLG motion typically is a singular product, maybe you have some simple add-ons,” Sid explains. “But the minute you get into your enterprise selling motion, this is where all the complexity comes in. You have multiproduct offerings, multiple add-ons that an enterprise customer could opt in for, which are not provided on your lower tiers.”
The key was ensuring both motions could coexist on the same platform. PLG customers who started with Asana’s core subscription could seamlessly graduate to enterprise plans that included complex add-ons and even consumption-based AI offerings—all within the same subscription framework.
You hit a point where PLG tools just can’t scale anymore. If you’re adding services, layering in AI, or selling into multiple regions, you need to pivot to a platform that can support that—before finance becomes a bottleneck.
– Sid Sanghvi
Head of Finance Business Applications
4. The Midterm Change Bottleneck: Fix It or Fall Behind
Enterprise growth doesn’t happen at contract signing. It happens midstream with renewals, upgrades, add-ons, pricing flips, and regional invoicing.
Sid puts it plainly: “Enterprise customers don’t just sign and forget. They grow with you and they expect finance to keep up.”
Without a flexible O2C system, these mid-contract changes become painful:
- Regional invoicing for subsidiaries and global teams
- Hybrid billing (seat + consumption) across products like AI Studio
- Custom payment methods (ACH, SEPA, wires) instead of credit cards
- Frequent contract amendments, revenue allocations, and renewals
And while more automation may help, it’s only part of the solution. Research shows that most (97%) SaaS finance leaders say manual tasks still hinder their teams—even after adopting more automation and AI tools. The source of all this manual work can usually be traced back to rigid, disjointed finance systems. The answer is a unified, end-to-end O2C platform that’s flexible enough to handle every billing scenario and change request across the full customer lifecycle—without requiring finance or engineering to reinvent the process every time.
5. Quote to Revenue, Not Quote to Chaos
Fragmented quoting and billing workflows once held Asana back. Before Zuora, quotes were managed manually, billing logic was brittle, and revenue recognition lived in spreadsheets. This isn’t a situation unique to Asana: 82% of SaaS finance leaders say that their teams are overworked due to the manual effort required to allocate revenue and adjust for complex enterprise deals.
“Now it’s unified,” Sid says. “From quoting to billing to revenue—it’s all in one system. It’s not just more efficient. It’s how you scale enterprise without burning out your team.”
This consolidation matters, because SaaS businesses aren’t just selling software. They’re selling seat-based subscriptions, usage-based AI offerings, professional services, and dynamic bundles and promos. If these components all live in different systems, chaos is guaranteed. If they live in one system, agility becomes your differentiator and your advantage.
6. Price and Package at the Speed of Change
The most successful companies are no longer relying on single revenue streams, but experimenting with a dynamic mix of revenue models. Despite the benefits of this strategy, it can also introduce significant operational complexity and costs. In SaaS companies, where hybrid models are more common, this challenge becomes acute—97% of finance leaders in SaaS acknowledge that their current O2C technology cannot handle current pricing demands.
“Pricing flexibility has become a competitive differentiator, especially in AI,” Sid observes. “If you’re doing pricing the old way through spreadsheets, it’ll take months to get to market and you’ll be left behind.”
With Zuora onboard, Asana scaled from launching ~10–15 pricing plans per year to over 30, with time-to-market reduced from months to weeks. This enabled them to rapidly evolve their AI monetization strategy and stay ahead of customer demand.
7. Equip Your Finance Team to Lead, Not React
As Sid put it, “Equip your finance back office team. They’re the ones who really suffer if your stack isn’t in place.”
When finance owns the systems, the entire business benefits:
- Sales closes deals faster with integrated quoting and billing
- Engineering isn’t building custom billing logic every quarter
- Audits are faster, cleaner, and less costly
- Product teams can test pricing changes without blowing up RevOps
In short, the finance team moves from gatekeeper to growth enabler.
You need a platform that can support a seat-based model, consumption-based offerings, and one-time billing all together. Otherwise, your back office won’t scale. And that’s what limits growth
– Sid Sanghvi
Head of Finance Business Applications
Bottom Line: Build the Infrastructure Before You Need It
What Sid and his team at Asana prove is that scaling to enterprise doesn’t require sacrificing speed or agility if Finance takes the lead and owns the systems that power growth.
If you’re seeing signs like:
- More complex contracts
- Add-on services and AI usage
- Multi-region invoicing
- Manual revenue allocations
It’s not just complexity, it’s your signal to modernize.
Zuora Billing and Revenue have been the indispensable financial backbone that empowered Asana’s transition from PLG to enterprise sales, unlocking complex monetization and scaling our financial operations for global growth.
– Sid Sanghvi
Head of Finance Business Applications
Ask yourself:
Is our O2C process built to support our next $50M in revenue, or is it barely holding up under the last?
If you’re not sure, take a page from Asana’s playbook.
Unify your platform. Embed finance systems in finance. And lead the next stage of growth with confidence.