TeamSpirit, founded in 1996, has provided a platform for workstyle reform, named TeamSpirit, since April 2012. The solution integrates all the systems that employees use every day — such as attendance and expense management, time tracking, online approval workflow, and visualized work styles — into one. It’s also a Salesforce AppExchange Premier Partner.

To run its subscription business, TeamSpirit had originally built a homegrown app. According to Koji Ogishima, CEO of TeamSpirit, “Japanese companies tend to create their own platforms as an extension of their own product development. However, from a medium- to long-term perspective, in-house development is usually not the right choice.”

TeamSpirit’s own homegrown app worked with data in Salesforce, but made accounting a complete hassle. Because TeamSpirit is a subscription business, monthly processing is necessary and dealing with daily calculations is complicated. When there was a calculation error, a huge amount of manual work was needed to correct it.

Eventually, TeamSpirit didn’t want to waste development resources on its homegrown system any longer. As Ogishama, CEO of TeamSpirit explains, “What we’re trying to do is to create software that provides value for our customers. We use the subscription model as a means to connect with our customers and deliver a valuable service to them.”

So it needed the right subscription management solution to help connect efficiently with customers.

TeamSpirit made the decision to implement Zuora for subscription management for a number of reasons.

One big reason was the ability to easily offer multiple pricing packages and transition to different plans to accommodate customer needs.

According to Ogishima, CEO of TeamSpirit, “With Zuora’s platform, we have the flexibility to adapt to the changing environment of our customers. For every single customer, the number of users may change, and the packaging plan may also change depending on the degree of business growth. With Zuora, we’re able to respond quickly to changes without having to worry about our own man-hours.”

Also, as TeamSpirit prepared for listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, it was of utmost importance that they could ensure integrity in their accounting processes. Zuora provided this level of confidence and TeamSpirit successfully IPOed in August 2018.

TeamSpirit was also attracted to Zuora because of its good reputation for providing support in Japanese and for supporting Japan-specific accounting environments such as consumption tax.

Most importantly, the Zuora platform enabled TeamSpirit to focus on its own application and customers. Said Ogishima, CEO of TeamSpirit, “Zuora offers us a full-featured platform that enables us to focus on evolving our application and delivering value to our customers: 80% of our resources are dedicated to value-adding (50% for development and 30% for customer implementation).”

As a result of being able to concentrate on its customers and core business, TeamSpirit now has more than 255,000 users across 1,300 companies and has been able to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 50%.

As Ogishima, CEO of TeamSpirit, notes, “The difference between companies that can deliver on the business model for subscriptions versus those that can’t is what distinguishes successful companies from the rest.” And the ability to deliver ongoing value to customers is what continues to drive TeamSpirit’s success.