Case Study
Spambrella
How Stellarise created a faster and lower cost billing automation – and freed up 5 days of a CFO’s time each month.
Client
Location: US, UK
Year founded: 2013
Website: https://www.spambrella.com
Spambrella is a global cyber security solutions provider specialising in advanced email security services. Spambrella successfully protects its clients in markets including government, education, manufacturing, aerospace and defence.
As one of the fastest growing SaaS email security providers worldwide, Spambrella is a member of MSPAlliance – the world’s largest Professional Association and Certification Body for the Managed Services Industry.
Challenge
Rapid growth brings challenges in operational efficiency and productivity. Spambrella’s accounting capabilities had become complex and time consuming for businesses with ambitious growth plans. What’s more, the billing process required extra resources and time resulting in delays for in-bound payments.
Spambrella contacted Stellarise as they needed a solution for a system that could no longer meet their needs. They were using a combination of Xero, Stripe and GoCardless software to manage billing and collect payments, producing the invoices took 5 working days and the process to take payment through Stripe was similarly laborious.
“It wasn’t the writing of the invoices; it was collecting the data that took the time. We also had to employ two people to cross reference everything. And at the same time the volume of invoices was rising inline with our growth so if this process hadn’t changed, invoicing would have taken us even longer.”
Automation of these processes would remove human error and make a significant impact on their efficiency and productivity.
Our Solution
Spambrella needed a custom solution that would automatically push detailed invoices from usage data in their back-end systems into Xero, and automatically take payments with Stripe.
Developed closely with Spambrella’s finance team, our solution integrates with their back-end systems API to allow the Spambrella team to setup and manage a fully automated billing solution for all of their customers. As new customers sign up on their platform, they are pulled into the Spambrella billing solution so that Invoices can be created based on actual product usage every month.
Invoices are now sent automatically into Xero and from there onto the end customer. The solution respects the billing relationship; either through channel partners or direct to end customers as required. Automated payment collection is also handled through Stripe – payments are automatically collected on a monthly basis based on the amounts that are due in Xero.
The Results
Now free of the daunting accounting tasks they were experiencing, Spambrella has significantly increased productivity, allowing them to focus on growth. In addition to this, without having to hire extra staff members to cope with increased workload, they’ve saved on what would have been additional resourcing costs. The process is now fast, error free and fully auditable.
“Embracing automation has given us better control over business operations and our ability for growth. The automation project delivered by Stellarise not only allowed us to shrink the data collection time to a spectacular 10 minutes, but also reduced the likelihood of costly mistakes whilst manually entering data twice.”
Furthermore, the benefits of the Stellarise solution have reached further than efficiency and process improvement. Yvon Quiban’s month now looks very different in terms of time.
“I can now spend 5 days each month doing something else. And we don’t have to employ additional resources either – that saves us time and money too. Stellarise have a good understanding of our needs and as a result, we now have more capacity and time to focus on scaling our business.”
