Priscilla Rossouw on automating quote-to-cash processes

When you can identify where the breakdown in the system is and what is causing that breakdown, it becomes a lot easier to fix the breakdown. Just the ability to take time off and not stress, the ability to step away and not worry that it is all gonna fall apart because there is some manual element that requires my attention. Ultimately, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and we had to bring in Zorra for a automated revenue system. (light music) Hey everyone, my name’s Catherine Shuley. I’m on the product marketing team here at Zorra, and welcome to another episode of Get Back to Real Accounting. This is where we take the often overlooked folks

in the back office and bring them to the center stage, the accountants that are doing the heavy lifting of businesses day-to-day, and really putting a spotlight on them and their stories, their teams, and what they’re doing to drive impacts in their business. Today, we are very lucky to be joined by Priscilla Rossouw from AppFolio. Priscilla, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Catherine. Priscilla, maybe we can start by, like, telling us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do? I am originally from South Africa, but now I live in Colorado, so I guess I’m a mountain girl now. (laughs) Um, I love going out hiking, traveling, and just spending time with my favorite person in the entire

world. Kind of a, a departure from, uh, the typical, you know, back office image I think most people have in mind for accountants, right? Yes, I think in that regard, I’m probably the worst type of accountant. (laughs) So Priscilla, tell us about AppFolio. Of course. So AppFolio is a leader in the property management software industry, where the focus is truly to build the platform where the real estate industry comes to do business. We do not just want to be a system of record for our customers or a system of engagement, but truly a system of performance where we add value and bring them back to what they wanna do on a day-to-day basis. Great. And as your role as director of order to cash, tell us what your team oversees. What processes,

what systems, what do you look after? What do I not, not look after? (laughs) Then the list might be shorter. (laughs) So we truly look after quoting, deal desk, order management, billing, cash collections, revenue recognition, so truly the life cycle of the customer. That is an enormous scope, Priscilla. (laughs) What do, what does your day-to-day actually look like? Maybe tell us a bit about, paint a picture of a day in the life as a director of order to cash. I can honestly say that there’s not one day that ever looks the same. Uh, so, you know, an- answering that question is really hard because it can be anything from, “Hey, we’re launching a new product,” to, “Hey, we are overhauling a system,”

or, “You need to get into a room and really solve this large deal that we are trying to get across the table.” And at the end of the day, where, where do you see your focus lies? What is, what is your north star? My north star is everything happening automagically. I absolutely love that word so much because it should feel like magic in the background. I, I love that, that magic that happens whenever you eliminate that manual work, let your teams get back to real accounting. But, but that’s just, like, the work side of Priscilla. Tell us a little more about Priscilla the person. What, what do you like doing? I would say Priscilla, outside of efficiency, loves traveling and she loves hiking. She loves being outdoor and exploring

and seeing what is there beyond a screen. I don’t wanna always just look at a screen. (laughs) What is the last hike you went on? So the last hike, uh, was actually Trolltunga in Norway, and, uh, it ended up being a 40,000 step day, (laughs) which was a really long day to be completely honest, but we did 20 miles, uh, in just a little over nine hours. Nice. So y- okay, you clearly love exploring, adventure, seeing new places. Mm-hmm. How does that, how does that influence you as a leader? That’s such a great question. I would say that it has taught me that there are many different ways to get up the mountain. (laughs) Uh, just because you like taking one way doesn’t necessarily mean it is the right way. It

has taught me patience. Uh, there are many times I just wanna scream at Jock, “Get me off this mountain.” (laughs) I am now done with this hike. (laughs) But it, it also teaches me to enjoy the moments that I’m in, um, and it teaches you how to just stop, breathe, and take how, uh, take in how far you’ve come. That’s great. I, I, I love that perspective and I think having those experiences, you know, outside of work, with you personally with your hiking, that really brings, like, a great perspective to, to you as a leader. What, what motivates you at work? What do you love seeing within your team or the projects that you work on? What really drives you? The thing that drives me most is impact. Um, and I don’t know how many of you have

r- impact players, but at the end of the day, if you can truly drive impact, that is so motivating for everyone, not just for me, but also the people around you. And the biggest blocker to that, that you see today, what is that? Manual work. So manual work, you’ve brought it up a couple times. You said, you know, automation’s really key. Manual work brings you down. Give us some examples of, of manual work that you and your team are challenged with. There are so many things I can list in this (laughs) section, but I would say, if you think about go to market-… eh, the moment we want to sell a product a certain way, uh, and the system is not set up for that. That is the first step in manual work, whether that is on the quoting side,

on the contract side, not even to talk about the revenue side. When it comes to the revenue side, how do we calculate the revenue on this? How do we set it up in the system so it is accurate? And a lot of the times when you don’t do it right the first time, you end up with the manual work. Wow. So that’s really wide spanning. I mean, y- you just detailed how a simple pricing change, a pricing strategy change is really a ripple effect, not just for, you know, a billing ops team, but, like, this, this spans from, you mentioned quoting, all the way through to revenue accounting in terms of creating manual work. Um, double click into that for us. Maybe take one of those teams that are impacted by something like a pricing change and tell us about what that individual team or group might be dealing with. Well, let’s

pick my favorite team in the entire world, the revenue accounting team, and let’s pick their favorite tool, Excel. Can you imagine how much time is spent in Excel creating formulas that can support that specific pricing change or support that specific performance obligation at the end of the day? Got it. So because whatever this new pricing change is came down the line, systems were not set up to support it, they are now having to do manual calculations in Excel, and this brings back to your pet peeve, manual work, that ties back to, you know, the trickle down that all of this kit cascades through order-to-cash. Where do you start looking for these things? I mean, this is kind of a wide-spanning problem. How do you, how do you start to identify,

you know, these areas for opportunity, the areas to create that automation? That’s a great question, and I love gathering data first, because it’s really hard to make a decision on where to start in the process, what to fix in the process if you don’t have enough data that supports that process at the end of the day. Yeah. Maybe, uh, walk a- walk us through that, right? Like, the, for other folks that might be listening in to this, they might have similar challenges that they’re dealing with, whether it be a pricing change, whether it be something else that’s impacting their quote-to-cash. Um, what type of data are you gathering? First of all, where is the manual work? Where is the breakdown in the system? When you can identify where the breakdown in the system is and what is causing that breakdown, it becomes a lot easier to fix the breakdown. So

I’m imagining, you know, y- you’re going and chatting with, like, you know, your head of revenue accounting, your head of billing, um, maybe even all the way through to the quoting side on, you know, how DealDesk is handling that. Th- that’s, that’s where to start? That is where to start. Get everybody that touches the process in a room and see where the process is failing. That makes sense. And h- when do you feel like is the right time to start having some of these conversations? Long before it becomes a problem? (laughs) I would say there’s never a bad time to truly start. It, I think it is very important to, throughout potentially a year or every two years, go through your process and see what you can do to improve that process. It’s, there’s truly never

a bad time. That makes a lot of sense, right? That makes a lot of sense to kind of have these pulse checks without your, w- throughout your organization, throughout the teams that are working on these things. What are some of the… You, you’ve seen this a couple times, right? You know, you’ve, you’ve looked after, um, a couple different, you know, order-to-cash organizations, or at least been a part of them. What are some of, like, the leading indicators that you’ve seen? We mentioned pricing changes. W- what else are, you know, signs that you need to start reevaluating these things? When you get new revenue goals at the end of the day. Most of the time, we try and scale for a certain number. You know, you have 1 billion in your head, and that’s the number you, you scale for, and it’s great. But what happens when you get to 1.2 billion? What happens when you get to 2 billion? So

n- understanding the company’s goals, the, the OKRs, the mission, the vision of the entity at the end of the day can really help you prepare for these types of changes. Priscilla, I love that, ’cause you’re getting into this, um, you’re getting into this notion of, uh, accounting teams, order-to-cash teams really becoming strategic advisors to the business. This is not just a back-office function that serves as a service to the business. What, what I’m hearing you say is that this really is strategic advice that you are empowering the business with on how to operate more efficiently, how to be that good partner to the business. Priscilla, that makes sense, and thinking about, you know, these different revenue goals that company has, companies have, thinking about, um, you know, different initiatives,

paint an example. Tell us about something that you’ve experienced personally whenever you’re having to rethink order-to-cash as a result of some of those actions. The most recent one I can think about is when the company launched a new market share campaign. It impacted how we went to market. It impacted how we ended up pricing at the end of the day, and order-to-cash was truly tossed with figuring it out, understanding how to support that, whether that is from a short-term Band-Aid solution (laughs) to, “Hey, this is just fully manual.” Got it. So new, new pricing was effectively just handed down. It was both a go-to-market initiative and

revenue accounting, order-to-cash. You just said, “Hey, you gotta figure it out at all cost.” Yes. How, how do you make that happen? What did that, what did that entail? (laughs) Bribery through my team. (laughs) Bribery. Br- bri- bribery works. Uh, wh- what did you, out of curiosity, what did you bribe your team with? (laughs) A promise of a fully automated system relatively soon (laughs), uh, dinners, drinks, and, uh, lots of snacks. (laughs) Got it. But, you know-Bribery aside, I, it sounded like it was, it was manual work. And that’s, that’s why you were having to go to them and make these concessions, right? Exactly. That look like more Excel sheets, that look like manual order entry. What, what did that look

like? It looked like a few different flavors but it meant that the order management team had to do search and quoting manual. It meant that the deal days team had to create certain terms manual. It meant that the revenue recognition team had to recognize revenue manually. So this is actually interesting because this was a company initiative, right? And I’m assuming, you know, there’s, there’s probably an expectation to report out on success of this as well, right? How the heck did you report out on this? How did, how did you do that whenever data was spread across systems, whenever you’re doing this work manually? Ultimately this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and we had to bring in ZORAT for a automated revenue system.

But up until the point where we made this decision, it was truly the revenue team that went and collected different data sets across multiple systems, putting it all together in an Excel file to get to the number. Wow. So, uh, and these are our unsung heroes, right? These are our accountants that are doing all this manual work and, you know, in the spirit of things, like, you, you had to find a solution to get them out of this, you know, spreadsheet nightmare. So Priscilla, like, I’m hearing it’s a balance, right? Like, you’re being asked to not only report on results, be a strategic partner to the business, but also stand up, you know, these really challenging new go-to-market models, new pricing models. How, how do you balance between the two? There’s a very fine line at the end of the day. Nobody

wants to be the person that says no to new go-to-market strategies or company initiatives, but sometimes you have to say no. And in a previous life, there might have been a GIF of me saying no. Wait, wait. W- a, a GIF? There was a GIF of you saying no? There might be. (laughs) I, the, the mental image I have is, you know, uh, you know, sales team, “Hey, Priscilla, can we do this super creative thing?” And the response is just… (laughs) That was the response. (laughs) You, you know, I think that’s really, that, I think that probably resonates with a lot of similar order-to-cash leaders out there. I feel like a lot of times folks that are in your position are put in these really tough situations where, you know, you have

systems, you have processes, you have manual work, you have this sort of, you know, entire cloud of things that you’re working towards and you can’t keep all the balls in the air at the same time, especially when, you know, systems and, uh, limitations are affecting things like accuracy, things like visibility, things like being able to, you know, comply with your company’s revenue policies. 100%. So Priscilla, that sounds terrible to be able to always be a, a no person. What does it take though to say yes? What does it take to not have your GIF in Slack channels saying no to people? What do you need across order-to-cash to be able to say yes? I would love to take it a step back. I wanna focus on quote-to-cash at the end of the day. Got it. Qu- quote-to-cash, so extending it, you know, a bit further. Actually,

ex- explain that a little bit. If you truly think about it, where does the entire process start for order-to-cash? It starts with the quoting. It starts with how the products are set up at the end of the day. If you have a system that is able to quote accurately, then you can pull it through through the whole system and simplify everything else. Tell u- tell us about an example of that maybe. Uh, maybe paint that, like, one step further. Why, why specifically is quoting so important for you to take into your, you know, purview as director of order-to-cash, or should I say director of quote-to-cash? (laughs) I would say it is because of how it impacts revenue at the end of the day.

So if you set up a product, you have an accounting code that goes along with that product. You have a tax code that goes along with that product. So if you are able to have that correct from the get-go, you’re not gonna get questions from your tax department. You’re not gonna get questions from your auditors. You are not gonna wonder five months into some project or some go-to-market strategy, “Should the revenue be in this account or should the revenue be in that account?” The front end can be a challenge though, right? Because now we’re talking about working with stakeholders from sales, s- stakeholders from rev ops. How, how do you go about that balance of, you know, things that, things that they probably are looking for in a quoting solution versus things

that, you know… Uh, everything you just described, right? Like, you’re worried about tax code, accounting policies. How do you balance that? You make sure everybody has a seat at the table at the end of the day. You wanna be able to show them with the data where we are gonna end up with this, whether that is we are launching this product or, “Hey, we have to change everything about the way that we are quoting because it isn’t sustainable at the backend of the process.” Whatever quoting is outside of order-to-cash, what happens? This is where the process truly breaks down. This is where finance does not have a seat at the table. This is where we are not seen as a strategic partner.

To give you some examples, when you launch a brand new product, what’s the first step? It’s the quoting. It is how are we setting this up in the system for the sales team to sell? How are we setting it up so that we can recognize revenue? If quo- if quoting does not sit within that function, there is such disjointed process, uh…… flow in general, but there’s just also no understanding of how it works end to end. Whenever it’s disconnected, I can imagine the teams have different goals in mind, right? True. Sales folks, bookings, retiring quota, just creating the best thing possible

for their customer, versus your team, of course, is looking at financial compliance, can we actually bill based on what’s here, are the contract terms in line with, you know, company policy. Um, i- is there an example that comes to mind where this, this re- this sort of dichotomy of, like, things that the sales team wants to do versus things that order-to-cash can support? Is there, is, is there anything that, you know, comes to m- mind immediately for you on challenges there? A great example of that is where we were trying to sell a bundle but the system wasn’t able to sell the bundle, so it ended up being a la carte SKUs that we had to manually bundle into one SKU. Think about other things like SSP,

for instance. How do you allocate between these different products within this bundle when quoting is never part of the end-to-end process? Right. So I’m imagining, you know, a quote has everything consolidated on one line item, which is excellent. It makes it easier for sales to put that on there. Customers to read. Easier for customers to read, exactly. But your team would have to do the translation of that because they, it, it, there’s no context between this order form or this quote and the systems that your team has. Is that right? Basically, basically you have now three lines that you have to make one line. And who does that if the system isn’t set up? A human. (laughs) We’re back to manual work. We’re back to manual work. (laughs) So Priscilla, you

had mentioned earlier on, I’m calling back to some of your hiking lessons that you take into your leadership style, and that there’s multiple ways to do things right. There’s multiple ways to get to this order-to-cash, quote-to-cash simplicity. How are some of the ways that you’ve seen this done? I have seen this on a unified system, which is something that we are busy with right now. We have Zoho CPQ, we have Zoho Billing, and now we are building out our Zoho Revenue workflow as well. And I absolutely love that workflow because it is less maintenance. You have to worry a lot less about data conversion, all of that. An alternate way that I’ve also seen

it done was picking the system with the most manual work, the system that requires the most effort from your staff and start there. Okay, so two options. One, look at it as a whole and, and solve for the whole. Or start in bits and pieces, and start with the most manual work where you can see the most value, where you can significantly improve the lives of team members, and then work outward from there. 100%. I had a professor at school that told me that the way to eat an elephant is bite by bite. So, you know, the way to improve your- (laughs)… your quote-to-cash system is little by little. And having, you know, you, you mentioned that today AppFolio does leverage Zoho or is building towards leveraging Zoho

for that full quote-to-cash vision. What does that enable you to do? A lot less manual work, number one. (laughs) But it enables the team to actually start working on more value-add work, to be a strategic partner, to build out areas of the business that they haven’t had the opportunity to build out because they’ve just been so bogged down in the details. Priscilla, something you had shared with me in a previous conversation was all about storytelling. And again, I don’t think a lot of folks look at accountants (laughs) as storytellers, so I thought that was really interesting, and w- what is, what is your perspective on that? I love storytelling so much because if you are able to make a data-driven

decision, you can have anyone back you. Whether or not the data is good or bad, at the end of the day, uh, it gives you the ability to get buy-in from your stakeholders, whether that is launching a new product, asking for a new system. Yeah. (laughs) You know, FP&A loves you asking for more money for new things. (laughs) But if you’re able to back that up, it becomes so valuable. Got it. So regardless if the data tells a good story or a bad story, you have something to approach the business with and a perspective to bring. And would you say that that’s what earns you a seat at the table? 100%. If you are seen as a value-adding partner rather than just a back-office function,

that makes the biggest difference. So Priscilla, that, that ability to be a storyteller and to have even the bandwidth to do that, um, feels like a huge shift. Tell me a bit how that has impacted your ability to be that strategic partner. It has significantly not only impacted me, but also my team. Think about the ability for them to now not do a order entry, but sit in a room with a product leader and give input on how a product needs to be set up, for instance. Think about, you know, a revenue team member that now has the ability to work with an FP&A member because they have the ability to pull the revenue data out of the system versus going and creating the

revenue data for the teams.So not just yourself, but across your entire team- 100…. this has made a big difference. Yes. In general, do you, do you feel like your team’s sentiment has changed? I think it really has changed a lot. They are very excited about an end-to-end system. They love the idea of a unified system. They love the idea of not having to put a bunch of different spreadsheets together to get to a right answer. And the ability to see that process move throughout the system, the ability to see, “Hey, this is where the number started, and this is where the number ended, and that number is the same throughout all of the system,” make a huge difference. Yeah, something that stuck out to me,

i- in that regard, like being able to see that visibility end to end, giving your teams back bandwidth, something that really stuck out to me was whenever we were looking at some of AppFolio’s stats, one thing that jumped out was the fact that you guys were doing a ton of amendments, subscription changes. And, you know, what that signals to me are things like upsells, cross-sells, um, you know, being able to, to go to market with new products across your existing customer base, which is really important for, for SaaS businesses as they grow. But I, I can understand how that also could potentially provide, or c- that could potentially cause headaches on the finance backend. But maybe tell b- me a bit about your experience with Zoho on that. Zoho, in general, has been really great

in supporting that. But you are right. There is a large increase in all subscriptions. And it is absolutely great, but it does cause that manual element that we’ve been focusing on so much. And Zoho coming in and taking that off our plates, great. It’s absolutely wonderful. And it, and it’s not just necessarily the manual work of the changes, right? Like, I imagine there’s reporting and data that s- again supports your storytelling. 100%, it’s truly an end to end. You know, like whether data is pulled from a quoting perspective, this is what the average discounting looks like, or whether it’s pulled from a billing perspective, “Hey, this is how we bill customers,” versus, “Hey, this is how the revenue

is coming through.” Priscilla, that makes a lot of sense, and being able to support your teams, being able to support all those processes feels like it should be a high priority, right? But a lot of the times, you know, financial systems, they are not necessarily the number one system that teams go to whenever they’re trying to, you know, grow their business. Is h- how do you make the case for that? With the data. (laughs) It goes back to the data at the end of the day. There’s such value in being able to tell that story to say, “Hey, we are changing our go-to market strategy. Hey, we are launching X amount of new products or, you know, different flavors of these

products.” We need to be able to support the business, because as much as it is seen as a financial system, it’s still a company system. It is, has a company impact, all the way from product, to sales, to forecasting, to the actual back office, as we like to say. Yeah, so it sounds like this is not just, you know, a system that supports go-to-market. Rather, this is part of your growth engine as a business. 100%. Everything starts from that first system. And, you know, to, to, to bring it back, I wanna, I wanna touch again on sort of you and how, you know, this has all supported, uh, your life, your team. What, what are,

what are some of the things that you think about as you’re proud of, either in, in your work life, professional life, or, or even personal life that, you know, you’ve created the capacity to do because of the changes you’ve made, because of making the case that you need to improve these systems? What, what has this meant for you? Just the ability to take time off and not stress, the ability to step away and not worry that it’s all gonna fall apart because there is some manual element that requires my attention at the end of the day. And Priscilla, in general, what are you the most proud of? The thing that I’m most proud of is where I am today. I came from South Africa. I wasn’t always seen as the go-to person because

you have less knowledge coming from another country. So the ability to be able to build a life here, to build a career here, and be seen as that impact player, to be seen as the person that has the ability to overhaul the entire system, the, the ability to be seen as the person to lead the function, that is probably the, something I’m most proud of. Priscilla, that’s, that’s really beautiful, and I really appreciate you sharing that with us alongside all these other insights about, you know, your experience at AppFolio, your experience at previous businesses, really sharing, you know, how you help your teams get back to real accounting. Thanks so much for having me.