Born of the merger between Polycom and Plantronics in 2018, Poly is a global communications leader in video, voice, and content solutions. It boasts having built the astronauts’ headsets for NASA’s Apollo 11 moon mission in 1969, and today it continues to build technology that powers authentic human connection and collaboration for the global teams of its customers.

Back in 2015, Polycom faced growing challenges with the time-consuming, manual process of allocating multi-element revenue arrangements. The company had a dedicated person working full-time doing the allocations on a spreadsheet, but the process provided managers no visibility on critical business data until all the journal entries had been booked at months-end.

“We had always been in discussions with our auditors about the level of granularity for our revenue allocations to help drive business needs,” said Chris Gomez, Senior Manager, Revenue Operations at Poly. “We had to admit that it just wasn’t practical for us because we didn’t have the systems to support it.”

When Polycom undertook the implementation of a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, the company realized that traditional ERP and spreadsheets weren’t equipped to handle the complexities of their growing business and decided the time was right for a revenue recognition solution. It chose Zuora Revenue for two reasons: First, because Zuora Revenue’s enterprise-grade solution is a leader in revenue recognition automation; second, because Zuora Revenue would seamlessly interoperate with its ERP.

The company saw immediate benefits. From the outset it enjoyed real-time data on allocations and shipments, and was able to get stratified information about the backlog.

It was soon clear that Zuora Revenue was a powerful tool, enabling Polycom to process hundreds of thousands of transactions. It improved forecasting, streamlined business, and promised an ability to scale for years to come.

“With Zuora Revenue, we were able to dramatically reduce the time spent on management reporting by automating our revenue recognition,” said Gomez.

During the merger, the new combined company upgraded to Zuora Revenue’s ASC 606 compliant cloud-based solution, which gave Poly visibility into the accounting impacts of the new GAAP standard. Moreover, internal management reporting dramatically improved, with new real-time insight available on everything from operations to accounting to FP&A.

“With Zuora, not only are we able to accurately calculate margins and forecast revenue by product line in real-time with a readily available dashboard, we now also have the insights we need to advise the business on the right pricing decisions while maintaining ASC606 compliance. ” said Gomez.