AppFolio case study

AppFolio’s growth journey

AppFolio has experienced remarkable growth in the property management software space, expanding from a startup to a public company serving over 20,000 customers. For a SaaS business model like AppFolio’s, this growth also translates to increasing complexity: more SKUs, more customer segments, more pricing tiers, and exponentially more subscription changes and amendments.

Inside AppFolio, Priscilla Rossouw’s remit sits at the intersection of sales, finance, and operations. On any given day, that can mean aligning with product on how a new SKU is set up, partnering with sales on a pricing motion, or making sure revenue can be recognized cleanly and confidently. “As a director of order to cash, I can honestly say that there’s not one day that ever looks the same,” she says.

A seasoned hiker, Rossouw approaches leadership challenges the way she approaches a climb: “There are many different ways to get up the mountain… It has taught me patience… and it teaches you how to just stop, breathe and take in how far you’ve come.” And from that vantage point, AppFolio has quite the successful ascent story to tell. 

But the journey wasn’t always easy. 

The cracks begin to show

Business was booming, subscription growth was up, and AppFolio’s product catalog and pricing motions were expanding fast. But these new added layers of go-to-market complexity soon revealed just how much of the company’s quote-to-cash infrastructure still relied on manual steps and Excel workarounds. 

When a new market-share campaign hit, it pushed already-strained processes past their limit as seemingly simple challenges cascaded into operational nightmares. “We were trying to sell a bundle. But the system wasn’t able to sell the bundle,” Priscilla recalls. What looked elegant on a one-line quote became a thicket of edge cases for billing and revenue to unwind. “So it ended up being a la carte SKUs that we had to manually bundle into one SKU. A bundle that wasn’t a bundle.”

This exposed the bigger story: “How do you allocate between these different products within this bundle… when quoting is never part of the end-to-end process? You have now three lines that you have to make one line… And who does that if the system isn’t set up? A human. We’re back to manual.”

Then came the surge in customer changes—upgrades, add-ons, amendments. AppFolio’s subscription changes jumped substantially year over year. While this represented healthy growth and customer expansion, for Priscilla, it meant more of her biggest pet peeve: manual work.

Every change rippled through billing, revenue recognition, and reporting. Without automation, “It means chaos.”

“We were trying to sell a bundle. But the system wasn’t able to sell the bundle. So it ended up being a la carte SKUs that we had to manually bundle into one SKU. A bundle that wasn’t a bundle.”

–Priscilla Rossouw, Director of Order to Cash, AppFolio

The tipping point

The impact of the new unsupported go-to-market strategies meant manual touchpoints and more work for multiple teams, Priscilla recalls: “The order management team was doing manual order entry. The deal desk team was creating certain terms manually. The revenue recognition team had to recognize revenue manually.” With quoting disconnected from revenue policy, billing resorted to bespoke schedules, while revenue analysts built SSP allocations in spreadsheets and reconciled them back to the ledger.

At the end of the day, there was one team tasked with making it all come together: “Let’s pick my favorite team: the revenue accounting team. And their favorite tool, Excel!” Priscilla says, half joking. “Can you imagine how much time is spent in Excel, creating formulas that can support that specific pricing change… or that specific performance obligation?”

Adding to the chaos was the fact that finance was often brought in after critical decisions had already been made. “We’re often the executors instead of the advisors,” Rossouw explains. “I’ve even seen product teams launch something and finance only finds out afterward and we’re sitting there saying, ‘Wait, we’re doing what?!’”

This reactive position meant accuracy and visibility were the first casualties. “When your data isn’t accurate, it affects everything. You can’t make quick decisions, you can’t back them up with confidence, and you certainly can’t tell a clear story,” Rossouw says. 

When leadership needed to see the impact of a GTM push, teams stitched together CRM, quoting, billing, and data‑warehouse extracts by hand. “The revenue team collected different data sets across multiple systems, putting it all together in an Excel file to get to the number,” Rossouw recalls. 

This was the tipping point, Priscilla recalls. “Ultimately, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says, “and we had to bring in Zuora for an automated revenue system.”

“Ultimately, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and we had to bring in Zuora for an automated revenue system.”

–Priscilla Rossouw, Director of Order to Cash, AppFolio

Creating “auto-magic” in the background

For Priscilla and her team, the transformation began with a clear vision and a systematic plan. Her north star was simple but ambitious: to make the quote-to-cash process feel effortless. “It’s everything happening auto-magically,” she says. “It should feel like magic in the background.”

Rossouw brought a unique perspective, having experienced both sides of a revenue implementation earlier in her career. When she first worked with Zuora Revenue, “It was a great system, but everything depended on how clean your upstream data was. If the quoting or billing data wasn’t consistent, you’d spend a lot of time fixing things on the back end.”

That lesson became foundational to AppFolio’s approach. “If you truly think about it, where does the entire process start for order to cash? It starts with the quoting. It starts with how the products are set up. At the end of the day, if you have a system that is able to quote accurately, then you can pull it through the whole system and simplify everything else.”

While automating revenue recognition with Zuora Revenue was an important goal—helping to reduce month-end pressure and improve visibility—Rossouw knew that sustainable transformation required more than a single-system fix. The true solution meant building clean data upstream and designing processes that worked in sync from the start. “If you mess up the front end, the back end becomes impossible to fix,” she explains. “Everything should just flow—cleanly, end to end.”

“My North Star is everything happening auto-magically. It should feel like magic in the background.”

–Priscilla Rossouw, Director of Order to Cash, AppFolio

The solution: one platform, one truth

Today, AppFolio is redesigning its quote-to-cash architecture, connecting Zuora Billing, Zuora Revenue, and ultimately CPQ X to establish one reliable source of truth. “My team loves the idea of a unified system,” Priscilla shares. “The ability to see—this is where the number started and this is the way the number ended. And that number is the same throughout the system; it makes a huge difference.”

The early signs of progress are already reshaping how teams work, make decisions, and collaborate. “What you change in CPQ or Billing automatically aligns with Revenue,” Rossouw explains. “Less maintenance, fewer conversions, and the same number all the way through.”

“When you use Zuora CPQ, Billing, and Revenue together, it’s a completely different experience,” says Priscilla. “Because the data is connected from the start, you can eliminate so much manual reconciliation and data conversion.”

Getting back to real accounting and real life

The new end-to-end alignment is freeing Priscilla’s team to focus on higher-value work. Instead of rekeying orders, they now partner with product and sales to shape how new offerings are structured from the start. That collaboration, coupled with trusted, connected data, is enabling finance to tell a clearer story about business performance. “If you can tell a story with your data, you can get anyone to back you—whether the news is good or bad,” Priscilla explains. 

The human impact has been equally significant. Manual workloads are easing, close cycles are becoming less stressful, and team morale is improving as people see the tangible benefits of unified systems. As Rossouw puts it, “The ability to take time off and not stress—to step away and not worry that it’s all going to fall apart—that is life-changing.” 

AppFolio’s goal wasn’t just automation for its own sake, but to create a system that runs so seamlessly, the complexity disappears into the background. That’s the “auto-magic” Rossouw envisions: a unified, connected foundation where data flows effortlessly from quote to cash, powering scale without the chaos.

“The ability to take time off and not stress—to step away and not worry that it’s all going to fall apart—that is life-changing.”

–Priscilla Rossouw, Director of Order to Cash, AppFolio