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

The Challenge

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.

The Solution

Canva was searching for a partner that had both accounting and technical systems expertise. As an expert in financial data management, Leapfin had 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.