How AirOps shifted from manual billing to strategic finance with Tabs

About AirOps

AirOps is an AI search and content orchestration platform that helps teams unlock the full potential of their content pipeline. It gives customers visibility into how they are performing in AI search and enables them to take the right actions to improve rankings and generate high-impact content. As a fast-growing company, AirOps is building the operational foundation to support a hybrid go-to-market motion spanning product-led growth (PLG) and enterprise sales. Leading this hybrid shift behind the scenes is Aayush Daftari, who oversees finance, operations, legal, HR, and data as a one-person finance team.

The Challenge: Manual Processes Slowed Growth and Complicated Reconciliation

As AirOps matured from a PLG motion into a more enterprise-focused business, its finance stack was quickly outpaced. The company was using a patchwork of payment processing, spreadsheets, and Notion pages to manage subscriptions and billing. This resulted in limited customer visibility, painful reconciliation workflows, and a messy monthly close.

“I was spending at least 10–15% of my time tracking down payments. It wasn’t strategic work, but ‘catching up and trying to figure out who was overdue’ work. Our outsourced accountants were likely spending 20–30% of their time per week.”

— Aayush Daftari, Head of Finance and Operations at AirOps

According to Aayush, “Setup and tracking of payments sucked up a lot of time. There was a lack of visibility into what's going on with our customers and what we need to follow up on. We had a lot of accounting issues because we couldn’t cleanly reconcile from Stripe and every individual invoice into QBO.”

• High-effort billing setup: Invoicing and subscription management took 20–30 minutes per contract, all handled manually through Stripe and spreadsheets.
• Broken reconciliation: It took six months to clean up accounting issues caused by the lack of a clean sync between Stripe and QuickBooks Online (QBO).
• Slow and unreliable close: AirOps completed monthly close in 10 days, and were still left with unreconciled invoices.
• Limited visibility: Aayush and external finance partners had no clear, singular view into customer status, collections, or where to focus follow-up efforts.

Why Tabs: Clean, Connected, and Built for Scale

When Aayush discovered Tabs, he found “it met a lot of the needs, and came highly recommended by trusted peers.” At the time, billing and collections were the biggest pain points in AirOps’ finance workflows. Tabs quickly emerged as the best-fit solution.

“Tabs has been a game changer in terms of time saving. It’s also so simple and intuitive. You don't get a good, clean collections view in most products—Tabs nails that. I just check the ARR waterfall to see where we might be seeing churn.” — Aayush Daftari, Head of Finance and Operations at AirOps

While AirOps still uses Stripe to support its PLG motion, Tabs now serves as the system of intelligence for revenue, offering seamless integration with Stripe to unify data across both PLG and enterprise sales. For Aayush, the value was clear. “I would want everything in Tabs. It’s the small elements, like clean visibility and control, that make a huge difference.” 

The biggest standout features?

• Auto-ingestion from contracts: Tabs automatically pulls in key contract details, dramatically reducing manual entry.
• AI-powered reconciliation: Smart reconciliation workflows eliminate time-consuming Stripe-QBO issues and reduce human error.
• Clean Kanban-style views for collections: A centralized, intuitive view gives AirOps a quick read on where to focus collections efforts.
• ARR waterfall reporting: Gives clear insight into revenue and upcoming cash flow.

Life with Tabs: From Firefighting to Forecasting

Since switching to Tabs, AirOps has transformed how it manages billing, collections, and financial operations. Manual work that once consumed hours each week has been replaced by automated processes, freeing Aayush to focus on strategic finance initiatives.

“My focus is no longer on execution. Where I was spending my time in Stripe and spreadsheets has now fully shifted to monitoring ARR waterfall, collections, and forecasting. I’m now focusing more of my time on our strategic vision and what’s next for the business.” — Aayush Daftari, Head of Finance and Operations at AirOps

Aayush now spends less time cleaning up Stripe data and more time planning for growth. As a result, AirOps has seen:

• Faster contract processing: 75% faster contract processing.
• Dramatically improved collections: 87% reduction in aged receivables.
• Real-time visibility for better decision-making: Tabs’ clean reporting dashboards give AirOps a single pane of glass to spot churn risk and prioritize follow-ups.

With day-to-day billing automated with Tabs, Aayush is better positioned to support a high-growth hybrid GTM motion at AirOps and now focuses more of his energy on ARR forecasting, financial metrics, and forward-looking planning.