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We knew we had to move online, but it was a huge undertaking and a cultural shift. We needed partners who could help guide us through the process from a traditional model to a subscription-based business.” – Megan Murray, CFO at eMoney Advisor

Company:
eMoney
Industry:
Finance
The Customer

eMoney Advisor is a leading provider of planning-centric wealth management software and solutions for advisors, firms, and enterprises.

The Challenge

In order to scale, eMoney realized they needed to move online -- and needed help transforming from a traditional model to a subscription-based business.

The Solution

eMoney chose Zuora as their partner to extend their self-service platform and improve the productivity of their sales teams, their financial processes, and the customer experience.

The Benefits

eMoney is now invoicing 100X faster, collecting payments 75X faster, and provisioning 127X faster.

“eMoney’s expertise is financial planning; we know we aren’t billing experts. Our philosophy is to lean on partners who are experts in their area. When we left the Subscribed event, we knew that Zuora was absolutely the right partner to guide us through the billing and finance aspects of our online business.” – Megan Murray, CFO at eMoney Advisor

eMoney has approximately 57,000 subscribers and is in the midst of rapid growth and expansion both internally and externally. In 2016, the company came to a crossroads realizing that the offline environment that had led to their current success was not capable of scaling.

As Barrie Effron, VP of Business Analytics Systems and PMO at eMoney, explained: “Picture this: a billing team sitting around a conference room table with literally piles of contracts – physical contracts – all of which had to be scanned, recorded, processed and faxed. It simply wasn’t sustainable. We couldn’t hire finance staff fast enough and our customers demanded a better way.”

Adds Megan Murray, Head of Finance at eMoney, “We knew we had to move our business systems online, but it was a huge undertaking and a cultural shift.”

After a team of eMoney executives attended Zuora’s Subscribed conference, said Murray, they “knew that Zuora was absolutely the right partner to help guide [them] through the organizational and financial changes required to transform from a traditional service model to a subscription-based business,” — and specifically to help with the billing and finance aspects of their online business.

As Rachel Kaplan, Program Director for Internal Systems at eMoney says, “While we have always operated under a SaaS model in some sense, we never really thought of ourselves as a subscription business — and our operations and technology weren’t aligned to a subscription model. It wasn’t until Zuora that we realized that our manual offline processes for billing and payments weren’t scalable to support the pace of our growth.”

From day one, eMoney was all in on Zuora. “Our sales, billing, contracts, legal and client services teams were trained on our new Zuora workflow from the start, and it’s been very successful,” says Effron.

Adds Kaplan, “We redesigned our entire sales process around Zuora, which has led to many improvements on our end — and for our customers.”

Just six months after implementation, eMoney has already seen vast improvements with Zuora at the center of their billing business model transformation:

  • More productive sales teams. They’ve created an easier quote-to-cash process for their sales, contracts, and billing teams which has slashed the time from signature to payment from 500 hours to 34 hours – a 93% improvement.
  • Extensible self-service platform for a better customer experience. eMoney has created a self-service framework for its customers to view contracts and update payments online. From order-to-revenue, Zuora manages all financial processes, working seamlessly with Salesforce and Docusign. “Our site is embedded in Zuora so customers don’t feel bounced around,” says Effron. “It’s a seamless, end-to-end experience for customers.”
  • More efficient financial processes.The flexibility of the Zuora platform enables eMoney to continuously adjust internal processes and improve efficiencies. They’re now invoicing 100X faster, collecting payments 75X faster, and provisioning 127X faster.

“In short, Zuora helps us to bill and collect faster — and leads to less work at every turn,” says Kaplan. “Zuora enables us to bill clients immediately and charge daily.”

eMoney continues to extend the Zuora platform across multiple business units, so all ARR is captured in one, central system.

The success eMoney has achieved with creating a self-service framework has far reaching implications for the future. “Today, customers can see their contracts and update their payments online. Our customers love it,” says Effron.“

“Being a subscription-based business without a subscription-based backbone causes a lot of pain.” - Rachel Kaplan, Program Director for Internal Systems at eMoney

“On Zuora, we’re now automating bill runs and iterating on our pricing strategies. We’re in the process of implementing tiered and volume pricing. It’s a whole new ball game for us.” - Megan Murray, CFO at eMoney Advisor

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