“Nue's quoting, subscription management, billing platform can scale with us from start-up to scale-up to enterprise.”

The Problem: Stripe caused selling and billing issues — and overcoming them caused governance challenges and SKU proliferation

 

Bench is North America’s largest bookkeeping provider for small businesses. Its high-velocity sales model (with over 5,000 monthly invoices) combines subscription-based ongoing bookkeeping with one-time historical review services, and see frequent mid-term changes as client needs change. Its sales motions have no room for error, yet preventing errors was more difficult than it should have been.

 

Bench leveraged Stripe for billing, but Salesforce and Stripe didn’t play nice. The product catalog would often desync between them, which required ongoing audits to make sure customer deals reflected what got sold. Bench maintained a customized internal solution to make these systems work together, but this wasn’t an effective use of anyone’s time at Bench. As Jake Romphf, director of business systems, notes, “it’s not our business to build a billing system.”

 

Stripe also fell short when handling process management workflows and guardrails (such as limits on discounting) — which Stripe couldn’t define on a customer-by-customer basis, or support enterprise-grade bundled options. The workaround? Several hundred SKUs plus constant governance.

 

Bench has a robust reseller network, but that reseller sales data was siloed from Bench sales team data. This meant Bench couldn’t get comprehensive analytics — and even if that changed, its pricing model wasn’t flexible enough to change quickly in response to those analytics.

 

The Solution: A Salesforce-Native Revenue Lifecycle Platform to align the entire GTM motion

 

Bench noticed Nue because the platform is built on top of Salesforce. This meant Bench could leverage its Salesforce skills to quickly implement and optimize the platform. Nue carried over key Salesforce features for process management workflows and guardrails, fitting Bench’s needs better than Stripe. And Nue’s immense flexibility with bundling offered a solution for Bench’s SKU proliferation.

 

Products could be configured in any way without introducing any invoicing errors.

 

Nue was able to connect Bench’s unaligned quoting and billing systems. Bench appreciated that Nue provides CPQ, subscription management, and billing engine functionality, while integrating downstream with any ERP billing solution. As a result, Bench could turn Salesforce into a single source of truth for data across the quote-to-cash process.

 

 

The Result: Fast implementation, agile pricing, real-time billing, and greatly improved Revenue Lifecycle Intelligence 

 

Bench implemented Nue over the course of only two months end-to-end, even while implementing complicated selling motions and discount automation capabilities. Because Nue was built on Salesforce, Bench found Nue highly intuitive to use, and could nearly self-implement with help from the Nue team.

 

 

Billing processes are now much faster and simpler to run. Since everything originates in Salesforce, there’s no gap between Salesforce and billing data.

 

“Thanks to Nue, whatever you quoted in Salesforce is exactly what gets billed.”

 

Bench reduced its SKUs by 96% thanks to Nue’s robust process management workflows and custom bundling capabilities, and Nue now handles all subscription management. Unlike Stripe, Nue can handle reseller subscriptions, unifying all sales data for the first time.

 

With Nue's flexible pricing, Bench can easily switch customers between plans or between monthly and annual pricing on the same plan.

 

Comprehensive revenue lifecycle intelligence gives Bench continuous access to data on product attach rates, churn patterns, upsells, and new product sales. And Nue’s agile pricing capabilities allow for rapid pricing adjustments if analytics data inspires new strategies.

 

“We went from having hundreds of SKUs inside of Stripe to now a dozen SKUs, all within Salesforce.”

 

Every team Nue impacts at Bench has found something to appreciate about Nue. Sales can now save time by automating draft quotes and orders with real-time invoice previews directly in Salesforce. The Customer Success team can modify subscriptions and change entitlements at any time with always-accurate billing. And the Finance team benefits from Salesforce as a single source of truth for transaction data and analytics.

 

“We don’t have a Deal Desk. We don’t need one.”

 

Bench selling motions rely heavily on rules and governance, and historically, the company found it tough to carry the appropriate conditions through each step of the go-to-market process. Because Nue extends from CPQ to billing, Bench now bakes rules and governance into the quoting process, and automatically accounts for those conditions throughout the entire billing and invoice process. As a result, Bench no longer needs a Deal Desk.

 

Nue’s billing engine gives Bench flexibility with when and how it creates invoices. Bench has created unique invoicing schedules for each customer segment, and can make adjustments at the individual customer level.

 

“If we want to do a one-off invoice,” Jake says, “or build an on-demand or automated billing schedule, we have the flexibility to do so really easily and simply.”