Leapfin helped Canva increase accuracy of revenue reporting and eliminate reliance on estimates

Top Hat reduced month-end close time by 89%, eliminated reliance on error-prone and manual Excel processes, and improved revenue forecasting - all within just a few weeks.

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Top Hat, based in Toronto, is the leading educational software company. Top Hat has been growing very rapidly – now used at 75% of the top 1000 leading colleges and universities in North America. As the Director of Revenue Operations, Minnie needed to ensure that her revenue systems and processes are robust enough to handle the business’s rapid expansion. However, because Top Hat’s existing financial systems could not scale with the business, revenue recognition and financial reporting became a bottleneck to day-to-day operations and decision making. In addition, Top Hat planned to launch a new pricing structure to encourage full-suite product adoption. This launch would introduce additional complexity that existing financial systems are not equipped to handle.

Minnie knew that her existing revenue processes in Excel, coupled with Top Hat’s massive transaction volume would not be able to handle this complexity. She needed to modernize her legacy systems and processes as soon as possible.

The core of the issue stemmed from Top Hat’s legacy financial systems being unable to handle its massive transaction volume. Before Leapfin, Minnie’s revenue processes relied on a lot of Excel and a SuiteSync integration between Stripe and NetSuite. Top Hat’s success also meant they could sometimes bring in upwards of millions of transactions in a single week. NetSuite’s limitations and legacy architecture were unable satisfy Top Hat’s transactional volume needs and would cost Minnie’s team 30-90 days just to close their books every month.

Since Minnie’s time was completely consumed by the month-end close process, there were many value-add projects she wished she could spend more time on to help drive business growth, including:

Providing analytical support for her CFO and cross-functional teams

Analyzing all business areas for opportunities

Ensuring revenue completeness and no revenue leakage

The right software solution was hard to find:

Searching for the right software solution was not an easy undertaking. Minnie evaluated NetSuite’s Advanced Revenue Module (ARM) as well as Zuora RevPro but ultimately found them both to be unsatisfactory to meet Top Hat’s business needs.

Since NetSuite’s integration with Stripe limited Top Hat’s ability to scale as a business, Minnie knew that using NetSuite’s ARM would not address the core of the issue. In addition, the quoted implementation period was greater than 1 year. Minnie needed to go-to-market in just a matter of months, so this delay is something she couldn’t afford.

Zuora RevPro was also not a great business fit for Top Hat. Minnie found Zuora’s bread and butter was its Zuora Billing for traditional subscription SaaS businesses. But since Top Hat’s business model was much more unique, it was clear that Top Hat would have to modify its own business to work with Zuora’s systems and this was a deal breaker.

When Minnie finally came across Leapfin, she knew it was everything she needed:

Scalable platform that can handle Top Hat’s massive transaction volume

Implementation timeline of just a few months

Flexibility to adapt to Top Hat’s unique business needs

Since Leapfin easily integrates with all of Top Hat’s existing financial systems, Top Hat didn’t have to change any existing processes or systems. Top Hat’s data engineering team simply sends relevant financial data to Leapfin to enrich its barebones Stripe data. Leapfin’s automation and rules engine also completely eliminated any reliance on Excel. Now, it takes Minnie’s team just 5 days to produce revenue reports for the executive team and less than 10 days for the entire month-end close process -- a reduction in days spent of 89%!

With Leapfin, Minnie can afford to move away from day-to-day transactional reporting and invest more time in insights reporting, analysis, and forecasting. When her CFO asks for revenue numbers, Minnie can just easily look at Leapfin’s dashboard.

Top Hat’s revenue forecasting has also improved drastically – much to the delight of investors. The FP&A Manager simply takes the deferred revenue number from Leapfin’s real-time revenue dashboard to incorporate into his forecasting model on a regular basis. No more using outdated deferred revenue numbers that don’t reflect what’s actually happening in the business.

Now that Leapfin is live, the finance function is no longer a bottleneck to business strategy and growth. When presented with a new business model, Minnie can finally say to her cross-functional partners, “Yes, this is possible. We can implement this business logic in Leapfin.”

The higher education app that makes active learning come to life.

Leapfin helps Top Hat reduce time to close at month-end by 89%

Top Hat Customer Story

Leapfin is more than just a software vendor – they’re our partner as well. They give us advice on best practices for systems setup, configuration, business processes, and more. Leapfin is an invaluable resource.

Director of Revenue Operations

Canva’s rapid growth had their finance team playing catch-up. Enormous transaction volume, growing business complexity, and siloed financial data made it difficult for finance to accurately report revenue numbers. Damien Singh, Canva’s Chief Financial Officer, knew that their revenue recognition process needed to scale to support Canva’s rapid growth.

Damien understood that along with the company's continued growth came demands for more sophisticated and timely reporting. The speed of Canva’s rapid global expansion also created new challenges for the finance team who needed to be prepared to support continued exponential growth while maintaining accuracy in their financial statements.

As the company continued to grow, siloed and inaccessible data became another challenge. “Some payment providers provided only summarised and standardised reporting,” said Damien.  Transaction-level reports were not always available and the format would vary between each payment provider. Managing multiple payment gateways made the month-end close process increasingly complex.  Canva’s internal systems provided some transaction-level data, but the volume overwhelmed Excel and forced accounting to revert to summary-level reporting there too. This inaccessible data left accounting vulnerable to surprises at month-end. 

Canva was searching for a partner that had both accounting and technical systems expertise. Leapfin was experienced in both areas and acted as a partner and consultant.  

Leapfin performed a detailed data assessment in order to understand Canva’s unique business problem. The data assessment involved gathering stakeholders from finance and engineering to fully understand business priorities, systems challenges, and data infrastructure. 

To avoid estimates, each of Canva’s hundreds of millions of transactions per year needed to be treated independently. Since Leapfin specializes in processing high volumes of transaction-level data, the approach was straightforward. For each transaction, Leapfin automatically applies accounting rules and generates journal entries. This precision-at-scale was critical for the Canva team.

Canva needed easy access to a single source-of-truth for revenue data. Leapfin’s pre-built integrations with Apple, Google, and payment providers gave them a head start. Where finance used to rely on delayed summary-level reports, Leapfin ingests transaction-level data on a daily basis. To complete the picture, Leapfin’s implementation team quickly designed a custom API integration with Canva’s internal billing system. With everything in one place, Canva’s finance team can login to Leapfin at any time to proactively address problems before month-end. 

Leapfin continuously works with Canva’s finance team team to meet new and growing requirements. “When adding new payment gateways, it’s always an open conversation on let’s have a look and see. It’s never no, we can’t support that,” said Damien.

Leapfin eliminated estimates in financial reporting. For the first time ever, revenue did not need to be adjusted after month-end because it was already accurate. Since Leapfin operates at the transaction-level, Canva can disaggregate revenue and report by country, product, platform, and more. “Without Leapfin, we wouldn’t be able to know that APAC revenue grew x% Q1 to Q2,” explained Damien, “Now, we can substantiate initiatives in any region of the world and show the results in our final reports.” Canva's reports to investors provide all the detail they need with minimal risk of misstatement.

Damien’s team can report revenue, make projections, and address problems any day of the month. Simple searches in Leapfin make it easy to track things like refunds, revenue stream trends, and month-to-month movements. Without reporting bottlenecks, Canva is no longer vulnerable to surprises at month-end.  

Leapfin drastically improved the ease of audit and lifted a tremendous burden from Canva’s finance team so that they can focus their efforts elsewhere. After receiving Leapfin login access, auditors were able to go into Leapfin and perform sample testing without needing to request files from the finance team. Leapfin is intuitive so auditors could trace payments to Stripe and gain comfort from 3rd party sources. 

“We like to work with companies on a similar journey to Canva,” said Damien. Leapfin is a proud partner of Canva and serves as a solid foundation for Canva’s continued growth. As of September 2021, Canva surpassed more than 65 million monthly active users and continues to double annualized revenue. Canva has become the collaboration platform of choice for millions of teams and workplaces in more than 190 countries.

Canva is an online visual communication and collaboration tool with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design anything and publish anywhere.

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