Finance leaders unfiltered on tech, strategy and growth

… who don’t know me, I am the chief automation officer at Automate, and I founded the community to give accounting and finance professionals a place to explore AI and automation in a trusted and transparent way so that you can learn from peers on how to work smarter, not harder, and finally be able to do more with less. Um, I’m excited to join you today and walk through some of the findings. Um, today, I am joined by Zuora’s Chief, uh, Accounting, I almost said Automation, Officer, Chief Accounting Officer, Matt Dobson, and also Jillian Munson, who is CFO at Vimeo. So, excited to have you both here. Um, I know we only have about 30 minutes. We’re keeping these

unfiltered sessions intentionally brief for everyone, um, so definitely wanna dive in, but, um, for those of you who, um, don’t know Matt or Jillian, please go out and connect on LinkedIn. They both have, uh, a great deal of experience that pr- um, precedes their, their wonderful reputations here. So, welcome to both of you. Great to be with you. All right. So, one of the, uh, key points that we saw in the research was that finance leaders feel this increasing demand for finance to play a more strategic role. We hear it all the time, right? But the tech is w- in,

that, that they currently have in place is often, like, a key factor to what’s holding them back. So Matt, why don’t we get started with you? But curious how this resonates with you. Yeah. Uh, I don’t think it’s a huge surprise. I mean, I think generally, it’s hard to have for the tech to keep up with what the business is doing. Um, and I think right now, there’s even more pressure for more insights, more reliability in the numbers. Um, you know, there’s lots of cool things that people are looking at with AI, um, and that requires a basis of numbers you can rely on and access to documents and all those good things. Um, so I wasn’t totally shocked by this finding, but I think there is that pressure to continue to be more strategic and, you know, having the right systems is really what allows you to do that.

Um, spending less time on kind of the, the reporting and the things that, um, are more of the day-to-day. I think, um, you know, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great CFOs who’ve always been focused on strategic things, and I think my team is trying to focus on those things as well, but it’s getting pushed further and further into the organization, and that’s a thing we’ve seen change. We’re not just focused on the close anymore. It’s how it impacts things going forward. It’s how we can drive the business, and I think that’s throughout the finance org, not just at the CFO level. Yeah. Spot on. And Jillian, I’m curious from your perspective how you’re maybe seeing and feeling that role evolution play out with, um, your role at Vimeo. Yeah. I mean, I think when you, when you think about CFO roles, oftentimes

people say, “Come be a strategic CFO.” And almost every company I’ve joined, and many of my friends have joined, you join, and by day three, there is something that’s not working right, you know? And that can be, uh, I don’t know, a, a system didn’t feed the right AR and you try to figure out what actually the DSOs are, or, or taxes, or any of those things. And so, th- that’s where these jobs get distracting. You end up down these sort of rabbit holes of, oh gosh, I gotta go fix this thing out there. And when I think about technology and I think about how you can get to sort of a, almost a, not lights out, but a lights out infrastructure on the stuff that distracts you, you’re just buying time to go be

that strategic person inside the organization. And, you know, I tell you, I, I think about numbers as telling a story, and every time someone who really can see the numbers from the top down can tell that story, you can lead. And so, it gives you so many more opportunities to help people understand where they’re going. And, you know, I spent a lot of time wanting to tell the story in numbers, because I think that really helps gather people into something and, but if I’m off fixing a system and trying to count something that was counted wrong and trying to fix it, you know, I don’t get to do that as much. Totally. And I think, you know, there’s something to be said for, um, not just even trying to fix something, but as

new, um, maybe new monetization models or new ways that you’re going to market come up as well. It may not even be fixing, but, like, trying to figure out how to use something in place. And so it’s g- a different type of fix, I guess. But, um, okay. So the tech can’t support the demands to be strategic, but the research also showed that 88% of the leaders, um, reported that the manual work is really what’s eating up most of the time, um, that they feel could be better spent on strategy. I think this is probably the most key theme, or, uh, recurring theme, I should say, that I always hear. Um, but Jillian, from your perspective,

is this a challenge that you’re also experiencing with your team, and w- what are you kind of doing to solve that? You know, it’s funny. I sort of think of it as two phases. Um, I think a lot of finance orgs have gotten a lot of the manual work out. You know, there’s some really good systems out there, and I think in many, many cases, you know, if you think back even, you know, three or four years ago, the number of spreadsheets, the number of manual processes, they’re all coming out of these organizations pretty fast. But y- you’re at that next layer of, how do I hook all this together, right? So you’re, you’re- it’s still sort of feels manual because you have to s- you have to kind of tie it all together. So we’re sort of at, like, that intermediate phase where now we’ve got some cool systems. We’ve gotten rid of a lot

of places where you can have manual, um, entry errors.But I don’t know that we’re yet at a place where you’re seeing that power of tying all this together into one big beautiful system that, you know, kind of automagically brings things together for you. I feel like that still feels pretty manual, and so it’s an evolution. I think we’re making progress in the finance, uh, world right now, um, in a big way, but, um, you know, we’re still sort of in that middle part where we’re making it all come together. Matt, how about you? Yeah. No. I mean, I think Jillian hit the points pretty well there in terms of, you know, there are lots of things we’ve done to automate manual work and some of the, the straightforward things, and I think

now it’s kind of those interactions between teams, the passing of documents, the audit controls, the things like that, that we’re really, like is the next stage of automation. And then combined with that, it’s handling an evolving business, right? Um, you know, we don’t want to be the bottleneck when we want to roll out a new pricing model or the business wants to do a certain type of deal. If it makes sense, we want to be able to support it, and those things are the areas where typically it’s a little harder because you have to have a system that can scale, that can do things that, um, you didn’t need worn in the requirements at the beginning, um, so you want something that can handle those. And then, you know, I think right now, we’re seeing a lot of that with more companies looking at usage for AI in other areas in the quote to cash cycle.

That’s different. A lot of companies haven’t done that, um, and you know, they have to have a consistent system that they can rely on. Sure, you can do it manually when it’s small, but a lot of these things that th- are starting small are getting big pretty quickly, um, and that’s when you run into problems. Exactly. Um, okay. So I would also love to hear from everybody else that’s on the line as well. We have a poll here, um, if we can pull that up. Um, and I think it… Oh, here we go. Um, so curious to hear what’s holding your teams back. Um, we just heard from both Matt and Jillian on some of the things around what’s holding them back, but curious, um, w- what that might look

like. Uh, and I’m just kind of like looking through some of these here. Um, right. Data, data’s always a thing, and that just came up. The tech and the complexity. Interestingly, nobody has said anything about the risk feeling too h- oh, sorry, I spoke too soon. There’s one. Um, but I think it’s, it’s lower. I think that’s probably a testament too, to how, Jillian, you mentioned, right? Like so many, um, different organizations now are f- either have adopted and/or adopting new technology. So it, it’s not so much on the risk side per se anymore, or the, the cautiousness side, but maybe more just the data that’s already there

or threading together all of these disparate systems that we have to think about, um, especially with so many different, I’ll say, uh, options there are out there now. Um, I think the barrier to entry has gotten really low with some of the, the various, um, technologies that are coming out. So there’s even more to consider and, and more out there to kind of plug into our, our standard tech stacks, um, and, and what that looks like. So it’s exciting, um, and not, uh, surprising I guess, in the sense that, um, a lot of it is just c- coming down to like how to actually utilize that tech stack. Uh, all right. So- The risk- Oh, yeah, go ahead. Really interesting, you know, when I think about

where we we’re at, um, in certain parts of our revenue right now, given the systems we put in place, and actually most of them from Zuora. Um, we can actually go test every single transaction, something we never were able to do before. And, you know, I, I make a, a, a light of, in our company, I always say, “No one looks good in orange except for Taylor Swift.” And I talk about this when I’m talking about controls and following the rules and doing all that stuff to make a little light of it, but point being, one thing that’s really great is in certain parts of our revenue now, I can sleep so well. I don’t worry about orange, because we can test everything. And, and that, w- the, the risk piece of this is actually really, really important, because that’s like one of the power,

big powerful things in these systems, is this ability to look at everything really fast. And I think that’s changing risk profiles for companies, um, really rapidly. A- absolutely. I think, you know, it probably felt like you even glossed over that, Jillian, m- because I think it’s so critical to, um, like note that what you guys did at Vimeo, and being able to go from like testing thresholds and then feeling comfortable with any and everything that falls under that. Like yes, that at one point in time was something that could help us because, um, you know, if all of your material, uh, transactions were correct, the assumption was everything else was too, or at least it would be immaterial.

But just the fact that you can test everything now. Like it is going to highlight any discrepancies. It’s going to be able to give you that, um, full confidence that you have eyes on everything now, and I think that’s a huge shift that we’ve been able to, um, overcome. And I’m interested, I know we can take it down a whole AI path for another session here, but it’s really interesting to see what we can do with all of this stuff now. Um, and then that actually kind of brings me to the next kind of theme here, but particularly around order to cash. Um, this is a topic close to my heart, um, because I love it so much and spent so many years so close to it, but y- nearly half of the leaders

that were polled or, um, throughout this research reported that the order to cash process is what is a blocker for growth if they don’t have the right tech stack in place.Um, you know, I know from both of you, uh, you guys have both been able to leverage, um, Zuora to be able to modernize the tech stack, but only 32% of the leaders reported that they’re- they’ve actually been able to build a strong business case for it, which I think is so interesting, because it’s such an unlock to the business if you can modernize those systems. Um, so Matt, you obviously fit nicely into an organization that believes in the power of modernizing and investing (laughs) in order to cash systems.

Um, but I’m curious what friction points your team did have at one point that was a growth blocker, um, that you could unlock with the right tech stack? Yeah, it’s, it’s a good question. I mean, I think the one thing that we had was, um, you know, at different points, we’ve had different parts of the quote to cash cycle sit in different organizations. So, you know, you typically see a deal desk might sit in operations, it might sit in sales. Um, you know, and they might have different priorities, right, than someone on the backend on the revenue team, who’s worried about getting the transaction rights and getting the right information. And one of the things that we’ve done is it’s all within one team in my organization now. So deal desk, billing, revenue, cash collections,

all the way through that cycle, um, sits within one team, and it’s allowed us to get a lot better alignment across the teams to understand where the work should be done and, you know, where the system should support it. Um, and I think just having really close alignment with the other stakeholders. I mean, one of the things that’s hard about quote to cash is it touches a lot of different teams. Um, you know, there’s the pricing component of it. You want to make sure the pricing is something you can support, but it’s also something that makes sense to customers and can help drive the business forward. Sales teams are the ones entering quotes at the, you know, the beginning of the cycle, and you want it to be easy and you want it to be something that they can make changes quickly and they can get information they need, right? The more you can automate it, the more you’re spending time on deals that are really complicated or complex and AEs are getting those sales documents really

quickly on the stuff that’s straightforward or maybe a first pass at a proposal to a customer. So, you know, I think getting that alignment and making sure everyone’s working towards the same goal, which is, we want to sell more, we want to drive the business forward. Everybody wants that same thing, uh, across finance and sales and the other teams that are involved. So I think, um, that close alignment’s really important. Obviously, because they’re products that we sell, um, I think it’s a little easier probably for us to get that. Everyone understands the implications a little bit more. Um, but I do think we’ve seen a lot of efficiencies by combining that into one team and then partnering closely with the other groups involved. I mean, I talk- talk to our sales leaders all the time, talk to the IT team, so, you know, we’re all kind of rowing the boat in the same direction, which is great.

That, that makes a huge difference, um, and is actually kind of great anecdotally as well for everybody to hear from… Meaning like, yes, you obviously have this inherent, um, support system behind you, because I understand order to cash so well, but that being said, like, there’s been other things too that you’ve done as well that have helped to be able to overcome some of those, um, those challenges, which I love. Uh, Jillian, from your perspective, what sort of limitations did your team encounter as some of those impediments to growth? Um, and maybe what worked for you in terms of building the case for modernizing your order to cash

tech stack and, and how you got the support there? Yeah, I mean, when I think about setting the price for an order, moving that through our systems, and then collecting the money, there’s a lot of information embedded in that. And, um, I think I end up in a lot of meetings where, “What’s happening? What happened here? What happened there? What’s this trend there?” And it turns out there’s real gold to be mined in the back office. And, you know, I really think that the, um, the more you can make these systems, um, be easy to access, you know, give you data fast, give you interesting data, uh, you can bring to the, you can come to the table as the, you know, the back office processors,

which isn’t always the most glamorous role, with insights. And then suddenly you, you, you, you go from, you know, where many companies I’ve been at where, you know, I, I joi- that usually happens when you join, you know, the sales team comes, “I hate your people who do this. I hate your people to do that.” You know, like, there’s always this, this tension, right? And, you know, you sort of feel badly. They have to collect the money at some point, right? But what happens when they can come and say, “You know, on average, you’re losing these kinds of deals for these reasons, and here’s what our conversations with the customers are like,” um, is really, really, um, really helpful. And you can really see it have an impact on what the actual product is and how we do implementation and how do we support customers

in terms of their use of product. So, you know, again, it, it’s sort of, to me, it’s about taking what is, was traditionally kind of a forgotten, if you will, processing function and making it strategic by flipping that with data. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And I think it just goes back to the first point we talked about in like, how can you be more strategic and what can you do with those tech stacks? It really does kind of show that big picture as far as when you do invest in it, all of the benefits you do get from it and how it can transform the business. And I think what it also does is makes everything that may be considered more back office processing

a bit more exciting and, uh, certainly a lot more interesting, um, in being able to, like, understand what levers you can pull, make some suggestions and recommendations to the business because you’re understanding what’s going on instead of just…… chasing down that payment or whatever it might be for, for folks, um, and being able to do away with some of those more manual things that really do, um, just kill kind of all productivity (laughs) in a day, to be honest. Um, okay, so final question ’cause I know we wanna leave some, um, a few m- questions, or I’m sorry, a few minutes for questions at the end. And I’ve gotten one here on the side, um, in a private chat, so, um,

certainly we have at least one there. But final question for you both, Matt and Jillian, um, so 68% of finance leaders in, in this report reported that their tech stack limits their ability to modernize the business. So not just the process, but the business. And I think, Jillian, you were starting to kind of, um, get at that a little bit, um, and I think, Matt, you also just ended up sort of, like, knowing how you modernized the, the business by just th- how you organized the teams. But would love to hear from each of you, um, some advice that you would have for financial leaders who maybe know they’re falling behind, feel like they’re behind, um, y- you know, but are feeling stuck and don’t really know

where to start or how to get out of that. Um, Matt, do you wanna kick us off? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, tackling a big modernization project is always daunting, right? Um, implementations are hard, but it, it, it also doesn’t necessarily get easier the longer you wait. It’s typically easier that you, you know, when you have it at the outset. Um, you know, I think when we’ve tackled anything, the key factors that we look at are, you know, what’s gonna be the benefit for us? What’s the investment in terms of time? And then, you know, are we looking at what are our requirements today and then what do we think s- our requirements are gonna be in a year or two? I mean, we can’t predict that perfectly, but we certainly want a system that isn’t something that, you know, is gonna be outdated in two years, three

years. Um, you know, so we look at, like, who the leaders in this space are, and who, you know, what the roadmaps are for those solutions. But I think, um, it’s not gonna get easier the longer you wait with these things. And we’ve seen that in the past, and I think also, um, I really hate to tell the business, like, “Hey, we can’t do this because we can’t support it in the system.” That’s a really bad answer. And I think, you know, that’s really what drives it forward, like, what, what is holding us back, right? And that becomes the key priority, and I think usually you can say, all right, these one or two processes, it could be the quote to cash process, with being able to implement new pricing models. It could be something in procurement that you’re not able to, you know, procure I- AI solutions as quickly as the organization

would like. But, you know, you, you identify the things that are really key blockers that you think can unlock, um, the most potential in the business, tackle those first, and then I think, you know, as you get into that cycle, it becomes easier and easier. You partner with IT, you look at solutions, you look at areas you can automate, and it, you know, you have to kick it off because it’s not gonna get easier over time. Dive in headfirst, I like it. (laughs) Jillian, how about you? (laughs) I, my, my advice on this, having done a bunch of these, is to find a friend. Uh, and what I mean by that is, um, I think at Vimeo we’ve hired incredibly talented technology folks who understand the systems we’re trying to put in place. And we listen to them, and we partner with them, and I think that we have really

taken the perspective that there are folks that know these systems better than we do. W- we do money well and they do systems well, and, and making a, uh, forging an incredibly, um, results-oriented partnership, um, and finding like-minded, uh, folks to help you get these systems in place, and, and to me, oftentimes that is do they understand controls? Do they understand sort of the responsibility we carry on the other side, on the money side of the system? Um, and, and what I found is taking the time to find those kinds of individuals and really stack your team with them is an investment in success that is so important, um, because, you know, I don’t know, you know, the, fo- folks on our team have forgotten,

you know, you know, eh, yesterday, you know, more than I ever- I will know about some of these systems. And so finding that trusted relationship where you really are moving everything forward together and your success is, uh, a joint success together, um, I actually think, from my perspective, in all of the systems I’ve done, it’s w- when you have a team that you can really partner with, that’s when it, it really goes well and you get the greatest results possible. Both of you are spot on with that, and I think there’s one word that you were both alluding to, but I also think of alongside that partnership is the education aspect of it, and the reason, or the word I’m using is more, yes, you have those partners, but it’s educating them on what your challenges

are, why they’re challenges, and being able to understand the impact of that and what it has on the goals is, is huge. And then Dobson- uh, Matt, sorry. (laughs) I do that- That’s okay. (laughs)… during every, every single, uh, session we do. I end up calling you by your last name in some capacity. Um, but you were kinda talking about, um, y- you were dropping hints at, like, well, maybe it’s not just this one particular challenge that the tech is going to also address. It might not just be, like, introducing some new product. It could be that’s the catalyst for it, but there’s also so many other organizational benefits from it as well that help toward, drive toward overall

organizational goals, whether it’s growth, or cost-cutting, time savings. All of those things sort of roll into that, and so I think when we think about giving advice to building a good business case, it’s certainly partnerships…. and then the education on what the impact is of making that investment. So, fabulous. Um, okay. I know we are, um, running down to the end here. Um, I see one question in the public chat, um, that came from Michael Rob, and it says, “Are you doing real-time payments or banking as a service?” Um, so curious, maybe from each of you, uh, knowing kind of like what… how you guys, uh, are executing on that.

Matt, do you want to go first? Sorry. (laughs) Yeah. No, happy to go first here. Um, we are not using real-time payments right now in terms of, um, our business. Most of it’s B2B, so we’re collecting, um, through typical channels. And banking as a service, I hate to admit it, but, um, I’m not exactly sure what we’re referring to there. Um, but you know, we have lots of automation on the cash side, um, but maybe Jillian has a better answer than I do on this one. (laughs) Yeah. I, I, that’s why I kind of hesitated to let you go first. I’m not quite sure on the banking as a service one. On the real-time payments, in our self-service business, we do, do, we do process payments in a pretty rapid, um, pace, um, and have, you know, our full infrastructure over. And actually,

it’s a interesting area, um, of innovation. I think traditionally I’ve always thought and been sort of told that there’s not much you can do on payments. You’re kind of stuck with that cost the way it is. And actually, what we’re finding now is payments as a strategic, um, growth driver has been increasingly the case for us, and our teams are, uh, finding amazing efficiencies and actually new growth and all kinds of interesting things by really focusing in on how the payment rails are working at Vimeo, which is, uh, really cool. On banking as a service, I’m just trying to think what that would be. I’m, I’m not sure I, I know exactly what we mean by that. But the payments, the payments and vision is very, very real for us. Yeah, and that’s something we’re seeing from a lot of our customers

too. Um, you know, we offer some payment solutions around fraud protection and payment retry, and it’s really, you know, you can get really strategic around how you’re, you know, able to recognize more of those payments to come through to pa- you know, work the first time, or the retries are happening at the right times that you have the highest success rate. Um, obviously for us as a B2B company, it’s not a huge piece of our business, but it’s definitely something we’re seeing our customers tackle and having some success with. Fabulous. Well, thank you both. Um, I’m actually… We will get back to all of you who have asked a question either directly or, um, like the one that I’ve gotten here. We will reach out to you directly. But in the interest of time, I know we have

one more poll to, um, to get through. Um, but as we’re closing out, um, wanted to thank both Jillian and Matt for joining me today. Um, this conversation, super insightful and always great to hear how leaders are solving real-world problems, um, themselves. Uh, if you haven’t already or you’re not already part of the Automates community, would love to have you join and explore some more AI and automation solutions and s- to problems that we’re all having. Um, we want to also invite you to the next conversation that we have in this series, the Unfiltered series that we’re going to be diving deeper into the report. Um, the next conversation will be on September

24th. Um, and then also wanted to make sure that you, um, check out the Modern Finance Leader Report as well that we have. Um, so lots of great insights in there. Um, appreciate your time, everyone. And, um, if there’s anything else, uh, I think that last poll, I didn’t know if it came up or not. Maybe not. Okay. Um… Oh, there’s a survey. Sorry, my bad. Okay. We will be, um, asking for your feedback in the survey, not in a poll. So thank you all for joining. Really appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks again, Matt and Jillian.

Thank you, Em. Take care. Take care.