Truly the gift that keeps on giving – Leeyo’s recent webinar, “Five Best Practices for a Successful Revenue Automation Implementation,” forms the basis for today’s episode of “Ask the RevRec Experts” as Matt and Jim are joined by webinar participant Jason Pikoos, who leads the Financial Operations practice at Connor Group, for a healthy dose of strategic planning and preparation.

If you were unable to join the live session last month, you’ll find it on demand here.

Following up on webinar queries worthy of deep dive analysis, Jason goes all in with his thorough strategy for migrating to a revenue automation system.

But that’s not all. Jason also weighs in on how start-ups in a pre-revenue mode can plan for future growth.

As an episode teaser, here are a few good rules of thumb for those firms with the “thinking big” mindset:

1. Make sure you fully understand your revenue accounting out of the gate. In revenue, the 10-20% of non-standard deals (which are often large in value, if not volume) are the ones that create revenue challenges. Know your revenue and the “levers/triggers” that impact accounting – try to even build these into your deals/contracts early on. We often find clients create terms not knowing the impact (and in many cases, the connection will not be clear to a non-revenue accountant) and are very surprised later by the revenue accounting.
2. Understand the data you need to complete the revenue accounting and work to get this data captured systematically and accurately. Even if you don’t automate, having access to the data will make accounting and audits much easier later. For example, if you know customer deals are often linked and flow in as different opportunities, look to capture a common “key or identifier” so you can easily link them later, for accounting purposes.
3. As a start-up, you are often at the mercy of the customers and therefore there is lots of variance in deal structures, which makes automation and accounting very challenging. Although not easy, try and establish at least some rules and create transparency and understanding around how certain terms impact revenue – that way no one is surprised when revenue looks very different to billings/bookings and maybe even gets management/sales more inclined to follow “rules/standards” as they can show better results to potential investor, board, etc.
4. Try to make commissions earned be based on revenue rather than billings/bookings – this creates a strong incentive for folks to care about revenue recognition and help make it easier. Sadly, this is often very difficult and not common. Also, look to build incentives into the commission plan that encourage following “standards” and capturing data in an accurate fashion.

Learn more about Connor Group at http://www.connorgp.com. You can contact Jason directly at jason.pikoos@connorgp.com.

The “Ask the RevRec Experts” podcast presented by Leeyo Software reviews questions asked through the website, email, out in the field, webinars or at industry events to find answers for each, often directly from our expert guest contributors.

Please submit questions and feedback to podcast@leeyo.com or via the “Ask the Experts” box in the right-hand sidebar.