Stripe announced recently the expansion of its revenue and finance automation suite to give businesses in Asia Pacific power over the entire life cycle of their cash flow.
With the launch of Revenue Reporting, and major upgrades to Stripe Billing and Stripe Tax, the firm aims to bring the same users-first approach to back-office operations that it brought to payments, according to Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses.
The challenges facing finance leaders
Common financial processes like billing, tax, and quarterly reporting are still painfully inefficient and manual, according to Stripe, adding that they’re also typically spread across a dozen or more software tools.
As a result, one-third of finance leaders reopen their books at least once a quarter because of accounting errors, and half spend 10 hours a month manually correcting discrepancies, Stripe pointed out.
Stripe said its suite relieves those burdens by equipping finance leaders with revenue management tools that are as sophisticated as the businesses they run.
The suite automates manual work and improves accuracy across the cash flow life cycle, from payments and billing to tax, reporting, and reconciliation, the firm noted.
Businesses like OpenAI no longer need to cobble together as many integrations from multiple software providers—a single integration with Stripe works instead, Stripe said.
“We're excited to work with Stripe to monetise our flagship products,” said Peter Welinder, vice president of product and partnerships at OpenAI. “Beyond payments, Stripe is helping us with everything from recurring billing and tax compliance to automating our financial operations.”
Stripe said that the revenue and finance automation suite includes Billing and Stripe Invoicing for acquiring customers and earning revenue; Stripe Tax, Revenue Recognition, and (as of today) Revenue Reporting for collecting sales tax, reporting revenue, and closing the books; and Stripe Data Pipeline and Stripe Sigma for data analysis.
These products use Stripe’s payments architecture to grow revenue on its users’ behalf, the firm said.
Stripe’s automated revenue recovery features earned Stripe businesses an additional $3.8 billion in revenue in 2022 by reducing customer churn and payment failures, the firm added.
Suite expansion details
Stripe’s recently announced expansion includes:
• A new Revenue Reporting tool (beta), which gives finance leaders a better snapshot of key financial metrics, including monthly recurring revenue, customer growth by activity, and revenue by product, and provides automated accounting statements for cash-accounting businesses;
• Stripe Tax API with multiprocessor support, which lets businesses manage tax on any transaction, including those not processed by Stripe (available in 40+ countries);
• Stripe Tax support for additional location-specific tax requirements
• No-code revenue recovery and retention automations, which allow finance teams to create customized triggers and actions such as receiving notifications that an invoice is overdue, or automatically sending an email to confirm a subscription has been canceled, to improve cash flow and grow revenue;
• The ability to set subscription schedules in the Stripe Dashboard, letting users model complex subscriptions with various trial and pricing periods and automate those changes over time. Stripe developed this functionality as part of a multiyear effort to support Atlassian’s enterprise needs and is now making it generally available;
• A new Salesforce CPQ connector, allowing sales teams to create a new Stripe-powered subscription for a customer directly within Salesforce;
• Automatic reconciliation capabilities to help businesses compare order-level data from their systems of record with Stripe transactions and bank deposits, providing clear visibility into cash collection and ensuring that accounts balance.
