How Rachel Noel’s team rebuilt finance for real accounting

You don’t wanna wait for things to be fully broken. Our teams didn’t have time for anything except fixing data. Close takes approximately three days. Now, um, that things work more seamlessly between billing and revenue, we’ve shifted the focus to be more focused on our quoting tool and, uh, how we do our processes from the beginning. Now, with our close process lasting three days, teams are not working late nights, not working weekends, and when teams wanna take vacation, we can be a lot more flexible than, uh, we would’ve been prior to the reimplementation.

Hey everyone. My name is Catherine Sheely, and today we’ll be kicking off one of the first of our series where we talk to real accountants and how they are getting back to real accounting. So today I’m really excited to be joined by Zoho’s own Rachel Noe. Rachel, welcome. Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. Today, this is the first part of three in our series with Rachel, and in this first part, we will be talking not just about org structure, cross-functional collaboration, audit, but how the technology transformation has informed some of those shifts in your team, in your team culture, how that’s affected team morale, and overall just generally how you operate in your finance org today. So Rachel, are you ready to jump right in? Definitely. So maybe we can actually start, Rachel,

by introducing the folks, uh, to you and your role. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Zoho today. So I lead the quote to cash and revenue accounting functions here at Zoho. So what that means is I’m responsible for the deal desk team, who’s making sure the deals get signed and booked on time, the billing team, who’s making sure the invoices go out accurately, collections, who’s making sure we actually get the cash, and the revenue team, who’s making sure we recognize revenue in accordance with US GAAP. So I spend a lot of time working cross-functionally, making sure the processes are working seamlessly end-to-end, working with IT, working with product to try to make our systems better, and working with sales on deal structure. Makes sense, Rachel. And, you know,

you are kind of Zoho’s customer zero in a certain se- (laughs) in a certain sense of the word. A few years ago, we went through a reimplementation process of Zoho, and you were heavily involved in that. Maybe you can give us an overview of- of why that was necessary in the first place. A handful of years ago, when we were on our old system, we were on a very, very old version of Zoho Billing that had a lot of technical debt. We had a customized integration layer in between Zoho Billing and Zoho Revenue that actually required a lot of manual intervention from the revenue team to even get the data into Zoho Revenue. It would take a team member a day and a half to even do that piece. And then we were spending 15 days

on our close. This was just a very long process, and FP&A, our CFO, and all the stakeholders that needed the numbers were not getting the data timely. Sales was wanting to structure deals differently, and as different deal structures were coming through, that just put even more pressure on our close process. Finance was starting to get in the way of sales wanting to sell these different deal structures. So all of that culminated to a place where our leadership really supported this reimplementation. Got it. So it wasn’t just, you know, the fact that your team was really bogged down with this 15-day closing, and that’s- that’s half the month, right? It wasn’t just the fact that you weren’t able to collaborate in the best way with sales. It was sort of the combination of not just

the monetization models, the ways that sales wanted to do deals, the bandwidth of your team, and I have to imagine that rethinking this was more than just a technology transformation, right? You had to think back, uh, on the team processes and structures. Can you maybe dive into what your team structure looks like now versus then and some of the differences that you saw as part of the technology transformation that sort of informed this org change? Sure. So back before the reimplementation happened, you have to think that that 15 days of close I gave you was to close the quarter. Month-ends, we were taking even longer to give team a little bit of breathing room. So really the job for the teams was primarily focused on the close and making

sure data was right between the systems. There would be times where billing and revenue would exchange 100 different tickets a month just to get the books closed. So really the job was focused so much on the data and cleaning bad data as opposed to doing anything else. You fast-forward now that we’ve done the reimplementation and taken a hard look at our processes, and now close takes approximately three days. So we have a lot more time to focus on improving processes, to be able to give feedback to our product team because we use the products that we sell, really getting in front of some of the deal structures, making sure we can handle them all the way through, and having a chance to be a better partner cross-functionally with our FP&A teams, with our sales team, um, and our other counterparts.

And you mentioned there was a whole host of, you called them tickets, that you had to reconcile between billing and revenue. These are like the equivalent of IT tickets? Te- tell us about those. That feels like something that other teams might be dealing with. What was that like? Yeah, so it was both. So we would have tickets just between the billing and revenue team. We had our own Jira instance that where we could have revenue say, “Billing, please fix this,” and that would be a bunch of tickets during the month. Then we would have tickets where we needed to go to support because we had let bad data into the revenue system, so there was another set of tickets for that. But the ones I was originally talking about were the billing- between billing and revenue. It was because really we were using this custom integration layer, and it was a manual process between the tools.Got it. So, I

have to imagine that probably caused even friction just between the billing and revenue accounting teams alone before they even start to think about, you know, how they’re supporting other functions of the business outside of just quote to cash. Maybe you could tell us a bit about post-transformation, right? I have to imagine decreasing those close cycles, eliminating some of those manual tickets, eliminating some of those manual day reconciliation processes. How-how has that affected your team morale? It’s been 100%, uh, changed from then. So, before, you have to think that in order to support this, um, manual close process, it would require a lot of nights and weekends even to get the book- the numbers out in that 15 days we were talking about. And so, really, people… It was cutting into people’s lives. Now, with our close process

lasting three days, teams are not working late nights, not working weekends. And when teams want to take vacation, we can be a lot more flexible, um, than we would have been prior to the reimplementation. Right. So overall, your team is just a complete, you know, 180 of what (laughs) of what it was pre-this reimplementation, pre-rethinking this org structure and just unifying these processes. If you think about, you know, operational pressures that you manage today, things that other teams are asking from your team, if you think about the shift of that and working cross-functionally, maybe you can dive in a bit on how that cross-functional collaboration has also been impacted by this shift. Yeah. So now, um, that things work more seamlessly between billing and revenue, we’ve shifted the focus to our quoting

tool and, uh, how we do our processes from the beginning. So, really trying to make that process more seamless for the deal desk team and the sales team to be able to use our tools even more efficiently than we do now. That makes a lot of sense. So, you’re able to actually think, you know, more strategically about your role rather than just being tied up in the day-to-day labor of what that close process would look like and the day-to-day labor of reconciling things across systems. And I have to imagine that whenever you’re thinking about your peers in similar roles, folks that might be watching this, what do you hear are the biggest challenges overall right now? What do you hear from your peer cohorts on this? When I hear things, I hear that there’s still a lot of

use of Excel for more complex deals if you can’t get them into your system. And so, I think that there are still manual processes that are happening due to the structures that you need to be able to support but maybe aren’t able to put through your systems. Got it, got it. And what advice would you give those folks? I know it can be challenging sort of making a case that you’re not just rethinking technology, but you’re rethinking all of these operational hurdles as well. So, if-if you think about that, what advice might you give to similar folks in order to cash leadership positions or finance leadership positions to help leadership to feel the urgency of this change? Yeah. I mean, I would say that you don’t want to wait for things to be fully broken. You want to start and try to get in front of it

as much as possible. Because the stronger your order cash process is, the more efficiently you’re going to be able to launch new pricing models, um, and be more flexible about these deal structures and really be able to scale your business and keep your headcount low. I would also say that taking a step back and really thinking about your policies and why the policy is the way it is and if there’s a better way to frame it is always a good exercise to go through ’cause you might have some quick wins out of that. Let’s talk about team morale. How has that shifted since this reimplementation process, since this reimagining of both, you know, team collaboration, reimagining of systems, reimagining of just general org structure? Tell-tell us about how this has

really impacted the people doing this work. It’s changed significantly. Prior to our reimplementation, you know, we did have attrition because folks, um, did not want to be remapping data all day long. They did not want to be spending late nights and weekends working on something that really wasn’t what they had wanted to go to school for and what they wanted to do. I think that there’s a lot more job satisfaction when you’re figuring out what happened to the numbers as opposed to just fixing the data. Prior to our major process changes in our reimplementation, really, our teams didn’t have time for anything except fixing data. Our team, you know, they want to do real accounting. They want to be understanding why things change, be working cross-functionally with business teams,

getting in front of deal structures so they can figure out how non-standard terms are going to impact the accounting. They really don’t want to be sitting in front of a spreadsheet remapping an invoice to a booking line. It really made it so now that teams are not spending time on that. They’re able to focus on those things. So, we’ve been able to do a lot more adoption of really cool features that have made their processes a lot better. Like SSP Analyzer is a good example. We never had time to implement it previously, and we finally were able to do that. We were also able to implement an AI tool to actually help review the contracts, which has also made the team morale increase quite a bit because, again,

they’re able to focus on these non-standard terms as opposed to looking through the data. Yeah, so it’s not just the, uh, the efficiency of the team seems like it’s increased, you know, tenfold. Not only have you been able to, like, reduce all of this manual work, but you’ve also been able to even introduce even more tooling, even more processes that have made things more efficient. But at the end of the day, your accounting team can do actually what they want to do. They can do strategic accounting. They can inform deals. They can, uh, negotiate during sales cycles. And they can, you know, be that strategic advisor for the business and, like you said, get back to real accounting work.Rachel, another thing I wanted to ask you about, every accounting leader’s favorite season, audit season. Mm-hmm. How was audit season impacted

by this transition? I think, again, a lot of folks might be interested in learning a little more on what the before and after looked like whenever it came to how you interfaced with auditors and, and what that process looked like. Prior to us doing the reimplementation and taking a hard look at our processes, audit was very challenging. So, because everything was basically done m- manually and held- handheld by our teams, that meant that the audit thresholds were extremely low. So, that meant a lot of selections. And then, because we did a lot of manual entries, a lot of manual touches to the contracts, that also meant that we would have to spend time walking the auditors through what we did manually to get to the right answer. And Rachel, for someone like

me who is not in the weeds in revenue accounting, what is this threshold that you talk about? What is, what is the audit threshold that you mentioned? Yeah. So, basically what it means is when your processes and controls are not in a place where the team can rely on them, they’re gonna s- select items that hit a lower dollar value. Got it. So, the lower the audit threshold, the- basically, it increases the audit scope, is what I’m hearing. Correct. Pre-reimplementation, pre-reevaluating our processes, the audit teams were pretty scrutinizing, in terms of what they were picking out, what they were having to review, and the, the lift that your team was experiencing from that. On the flip side of that, what, what does audit season look like today? Yeah.

So, it’s a lot cleaner. So, one, they put a lot more reliance on the systems and the controls, so that means that the threshold’s higher. So, that means they pick less samples because they’re able to rely on our process. And so, that really eases the burden of our teams who are, um, responsible for giving them the contracts, who are responsible for walking them through their questions and what they need for the audit. And thinking back to just team efficiency in general, you mentioned we’re already reducing the quarterly close process by 15 days, reducing the month-end close process, and then the other, you know, big thing that takes a lot of revenue accounting’s time is audit season. So, what it sounds like is you were also able to reduce some of the time spent on that because the systems

were so reliable now. Yes. Um, we actually had a reduction in our audit fees after we reimplemented because the audit team was having to spend less hours. Another thing that was really great for our team is instead of just asking us a bunch of questions about something we did manually for a sample, they were asking about real anomalies on the deals, real non-standard terms that would impact the accounting. And so, the questions got a lot better, too, as we shifted to a more reliable system and more reliable process. So, instead of auditors saying, more so, “Prove your work,” it’s more of them actually picking out things that would probably be worthy of review in the audit process. Correct. And Rachel, is it, is it normal for audit cost to decrease? (laughs) No. (laughs) That is not normal. (laughs)

I, I had assumed so, but I wanted to check. Rachel, this was a great, insightful conversation into how we’re thinking about changing those processes, changing those org structures. For folks tuning in, part two will dive into, uh, some of the technology as- aspects of this, specifically how the Zuora solution supported some of the streamlining of these processes and unifying of these processes that we talked about today. But Rachel, we will see you next time on part two. Sounds good.