Hudl case study

Founded in 2006, Hudl is a global leader in sports technology based in Lincoln, Nebraska. The company’s smart cameras can capture every moment of youth, collegiate, and even professional sporting events, with analysis tools that provide extensive insights to tell the user exactly what happened in the game. Hudl has more than 3,500 employees and operates out of 15 countries; it has eight million registered users, and its app has been downloaded more than 16 million times. 

With the new requirements of ASC 606 and rapid expansion of the business, Hudl had to find a solution that would also allow them to stay compliant while also enabling them to scale in the future as a growing company.

“We’re constantly getting new acquisitions,” Thorin says. “The business is growing so fast.”

In addition to making adjustments to accommodate this business growth and comply with the new accounting standards established in ASC 606, the organization was also undergoing major updates to its pricing. For a cyclical business like Hudl—work often picks up in the summer—it was especially important to Thorin to remain efficient during those busy times.

“During our high-volume busy season, we would have to add additional days to close the books,” Thorin says. She shares that she’d often have to stay online deep into the night, completing her day’s work well after her three kids went to sleep. “During the close, I used to spend a lot of time in the evenings, working until 12:00 or 1:00 in the morning. I do not need to do that anymore [thanks to Zuora Revenue],” she says.

With change already on the horizon, Hudl decided to get a few of its international entities started with Zuora Revenue. Among other benefits, the revenue recognition software helps to automate some of the tasks that many accounting teams used to do manually. Indeed, making that switch helped move the Hudl team closer to where it needed to be in terms of automating those pesky manual tasks. 

Additionally, Zuora Revenue now makes it easier for Hudl’s accountants to quickly pull reports for better analysis at the end of every month.

But the real positive effects started showing when Hudl implemented Zuora Billing connected to Zuora Revenue. Those two solutions together resolved additional manual processes, which helped the Hudl accounting team to work more efficiently and avoid prior missed deadlines. In fact, Thorin estimates that Zuora’s tools roughly halved the amount of time it takes Hudl’s accountants to close. By their 2023 high-volume season, the integration of the two solutions resulted in no additional days to close.

And how about those late nights, when Thorin would find herself working well after her family went to sleep?

“I’m sleeping much better myself now,” she says with a smile.

With the extra time that Zuora Revenue affords her team, Thorin says that they can spend more time doing analysis, digging into how to make its systems more efficient and accurate — generally, the team is spending more time on building better for the future. 

As Hudl works to onboard more of its entities with Zuora, Thorin is most excited about fully utilizing its tools. There are more integrations, like one for CPQ, that Hudl hopes to accomplish down the line. In the near future, Thorin envisions a team that can quickly and easily report to management what happened in the last month, with no sleepless nights required.  

Zuora gives Hudl the ability to update large amounts of account information, including payment gateways and invoice templates; cancel multiple subscriptions post-customer upgrade; and cancel overdue subscriptions. Using Zuora Central Platform, Hudl is now equipped to handle complex contracts and billing in multiple currencies.

With over 200K subscriptions that require updates and tons of data manipulation and migrations, Hudl uses Zuora’s Developer Tools to make mass updates and distribute responsibilities.

Implementing Zuora Central Platform’s Workflow also helped Hudl’s developers to focus more on developing new features than on expanding and maintaining internal systems. Workflow is a Zuora Central Platform capability that allows customers to design, configure, and deploy workflows all in a user-friendly, drag-and-drop builder. Workflows improve efficiency and reduce errors by automating a series of complex tasks that otherwise need to be performed manually and repetitively. With Workflow, customers can automate day-to-day operations and trigger customer communications, provisioning, and data integrations all without custom code.

Workflow enables Hudl to automate the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of making changes to customer accounts — as well as a dozen other use cases that had previously been managed manually prior to Zuora implementation and had depended on custom code.

According to Devin Schroeder, Revenue Operations Analyst at Hudl, automation has saved Hudl’s IT, billing, and engineering teams over 100 hours per month that would have been dedicated to building custom code.

And automating is easy with Workflow. Adds Schroeder, “I taught myself how to use Workflow, and now I can build automation into existing business processes without asking engineering for help.”

Since partnering with Zuora in 2017, Hudl’s business has doubled. As Hudl continues on its mission to help teams and athletes win, it will continue to rely on Zuora as a trusted partner.