How Productboard, faced with exponential growth, scaled its cash collection
Handling the current growth of Productboard and forecasting future needs was a top concern for Arianna. With 5 unsynchronized tools, cash collection was a “ridiculous amount of work”. This pushed her to seek out a scalable solution which lead her to Upflow.
Arianna Cesareo
Accounting Team Lead
75%
Less time spent on cash collection*
-30%
Write-offs
-4
Days DSO*
*after 7 months.
Before Upflow
Since Upflow
10% bad debt, from unresponsive customers
7% write-offs
Zero visibility on AR metrics or analysis
Clear visibility on cash flow KPIs for decision-makers
Wasted time daily on inefficient AR processes
A 75% time reduction on cash collection
Mission statement
Productboard is a customer-centric product management platform that helps organizations get the right products to market, faster.
FTEs
>500
Industry
Product Management Software
HQ location
San Francisco, California
Stack integrated with Upflow:
Stripe Billing & Netsuite
Productboard says goodbye to bad debt customers
Before Upflow, Arianna’s cash collection process involved 6 reminders (both emails and calls). After that, if the customers still hadn't paid she had to stop chasing them. The process was simply too time-consuming and she had no choice but to focus her collection efforts elsewhere.
The consequences? Productboard accumulated 10% bad debt every year due to unresponsive customers
With Upflow, Arianna quickly implemented successful reminder workflows and saw write-offs decrease from 10% to 7%. Thanks to this, she’s no longer faced with giving up on chasing late payments.
Today, healthy cash flow is crucial. Looking back, we are very glad we implemented Upflow when we did.
Metrics: the driving force behind Productboard’s increased cash flow
Before Upflow, Productboard’s leadership was flying blind when it came to cash collection.
Why? Because they did AR manually and this meant they did not have access to the right metrics. With limited bandwidth and data scattered across 5 tools, Arianna did not have the time to build and analyze reports.
With streamlined AR processes, leadership teams can now access reliable metrics to analyze and optimize performances.
Upflow gave Arianna and her managers the ability to access real-time and relevant indicators. This helped them make better-informed decisions on cash flow strategy and cash collection.
Upflow gives us an edge to make the process much easier. Having the right info and KPIs in a single location has been a real game changer for us.
Taking a step back to accelerate cash collection
At first, Arianna was alone on cash collection. Her stack? Gmail, Excel, their accounting tool, Stripe, and the CRM. Needless to say that this process caused human error, double entries, and a big loss of productivity. Because her process was scattered across different tools, only she knew how to handle the load and this made her reluctant to delegate.
Faced with Productboard’s growth and scalability, Arianna had to take a step back and reassess the collection processes.
Thanks to Upflow, her team now spends 50% less time on cash collection, with twice as many customers than before. They now have a single source of truth, systematic follow-ups, easy prioritization, and all customer history within the tool.
Upflow has given us peace of mind and has helped our team make better-informed decisions.
Arianna's take on AR
Internal KPIs: When you grow, cash collection can easily get out of hand. Defining an internal KPI helps stay on top of it. Our tip: stay under 20 to-do actions per day in Upflow.
Iteration: Thanks to Upflow, we’ve learned a lot about our customers. It fosters opportunities to improve our cash collection process.
Don’t wait too long: Cash collection is hard to hand over when you don’t have a dedicated solution. The sooner you get equipped, the easier it will be.
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