Results With Tesorio Include:

• Team scaled from 6 to 11 agents and growing
• 30% reduction in time spent on daily billing tasks
• Automated AR forecasting delivers improved DSO
• Prioritization of team development achieves enhanced CEI

GitLab is an open core software company whose DevOps platform empowers organizations to create software more efficiently and deliver it faster with lower cost and reduced risk.

Sarah McCauley is GitLab’s Director of Billing and Accounts Receivable and has been with the company since early 2020. She manages a team of 8 billing team members and 4 AR agents located in the U.K., South Africa, Ireland, and the U.S. The team processes 1,300 to 2,000 open recurring invoices across 900-1,300 active accounts per week.

Meaningful Team Transformation

Arriving at GitLab, McCauley found an Accounts Receivable system that had grown more out of necessity than strategy. “The billing team had recently stopped doing order management. At one point it was the deal desk, billing, and accounts receivable — everyone did everything. Collections were something you did when you could. It wasn’t a priority, it was an afterthought. You’re not getting a good ROI from that,” she says.

The first step for McCauley was breaking out the receivables functionality from the billing team into an individual accounts receivable team. But the solution was not just adding or restructuring personnel. According to McCauley, “It’s scaling the business but in a meaningful way, so you do more with technology. Having the correct systems in place is critical because it helps you handle the volume in a way that is scalable long term.”

Minimizing Manual Tasks

Before implementing Tesorio, her team struggled with repetitive manual tasks. “When you do so much manual work, everyone is working to just check the box and finish the task,” she says. “Agents were spending 45 hours a week just on billing-based activities.”

“With Tesorio,” she continues, “we’ve pared that down to around 30 hours per week per agent, and that opens up 10 hours per week for activity that improves CEI.”

Driving Cash Flow and Team Successes With AR Forecast

McCauley and her team have used Tesorio Accounts Receivable Forecast to automatically predict, track, and report cash flow. They use the workbench daily to prioritize and focus collections, configuring their forecast with just a click, and real-time cash tracking helps outline team expectations and drive performance.

“It’s been great getting the team comfortable with how the modeling works inside the Tesorio platform,” says McCauley. “We’ve been able to implement weekly functions that are taking us farther and farther away from spreadsheets.”

“I was creating the weekly forecasts at first,” she says, “but then one of my team members took over. She’s taken the initiative just from a call I held to introduce the team to the AR Forecast module.”

Sarah found it so easy from the UI perspective that she’s now modeling the forecasts each week and pushing them out to the team, really leaning into Tesorio as an all-encompassing platform. Her accounts receivable is now 86% current, roughly 10% higher than the balance of the team. In addition, other team members have begun modeling their AR prioritization off of her.“

Tesorio AR Forecast has been an enhancement to the process and has directly improved our accounts receivable,” says McCauley. “We closed our April accounts receivable at 80% current, collectively—that is huge—with the majority of that value being past due 1–30 at almost 13%. In SaaS, the current average is around 75% with an average DSO of 65 days—we’re at an average of 55 days!”

“For me, the biggest takeaway has been my team feeling empowered to use more of the Tesorio functionality, to really lean in and then see the results. It has been, holistically, a real team builder.”

Pathways to Promotion

“I’m all about prioritization, scheduling, and setting expectations. Now, we are in a space where we are much more automated, much leaner, we can create a lot more predictability and optimize AR performance,” McCauley explains.“

Tesorio does a really great job of allowing us to have that visibility, set those goals, and assess the barometers for those goals to see where we stack up,” she continues. “With Tesorio, we celebrate more team victories — reductions in customer cash on account, reductions in bad debt.”

“The quality of life is better now. There’s a path to promotion, and people have more strategic activities they can participate in. We can attract better talent and nurture them toward a promotion.” McCauley shares, “When everybody can contribute, everyone will contribute. Now, with the right technology in place, my team is engaged, their goals are clear, and they feel empowered.”

Ready to create an AR culture where everyone contributes? Request a Tesorio demo today.