One of the most promising emerging roles for many fast-growing digital company finance teams is the role of a technically-savvy business systems lead or revenue product manager. They are responsible for owning the company’s end-to-end revenue systems infrastructure, owning the process that starts with orders, billing, and payment service providers like Stripe, Adyen, and Paypal and ends with general ledger entries in the ERP.
Finance teams have used Excel, the lingua franca of finance, to analyze the business for generations. But the transaction scale of modern digital companies and the need to marry data from custom billing engines with multiple payment processors makes Excel clunky and slow at best, and often impossible to use altogether. Instead, some teams turn to custom-built solutions using data warehouses, or trying to stuff all the data into their GL system, which isn’t designed to handle it.
Consequently, business systems teams have emerged — at companies like SeatGeek, Canva, Reddit, and many others — to bridge the gap with a combination of finance domain expertise and technical savvy to build, scale, and maintain an ecosystem of modern finance applications: the modern finance stack.
If your company is approaching 50,000 transactions a month or more, it’s very likely Excel is becoming almost impossible to use as the connective tissue between orders, payments, and the general ledger.
If you have multiple payment providers, the challenges only get magnified.
And if you’re finding that the demands of finance to understand the business in a GAAP-compliant way are starting to outrun your ability to provide the relevant data at the right level of detail, you’re definitely overdue to rethink your revenue management approach.
If the challenges above sound familiar and you’re considering hiring your first person in this role, what should you look for? Here are some key points to consider in your job posting.
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