How PINATA saved time and cut costs with Tabs

Headquartered in New York City, PINATA is a fast-growing start-up whose platform serves as the connective tissue between real-world activities and insights from distributed data. PINATA powers hundreds of thousands of real-world jobs every year across the country, connecting a multi-stakeholder ecosystem from local businesses and freelancers to regional hubs and national offices. 

The Challenge

PINATA’s customer base was growing rapidly. As the company grew, COO Rob Olson was looking for ways to make the Finance team’s processes and tech stack more efficient. He decided to begin with the receivables and invoicing process. As volume increased, he knew they needed a more automated process to keep up with the company’s growth trajectory.

At the time, PINATA was using an outsourced accounting firm to manage entries in Quickbooks and produce invoices. This meant that every closed deal required not only communication with the accounting firm, but also manually getting the key contract details for the deal from Salesforce. The current process was time-consuming and inefficient.

Heath was actively looking for a solution that could streamline the invoicing and collecting of accounts receivable. The solution needed to be able to collect recurring credit card payments and be flexible enough to accommodate future changes in contracting and billing schedules as PINATA continued to grow.

“There didn’t exist a single source of truth for customer information about billing. Some of the information is in the general ledger, but it’s hard to get out. Some of the information is in Salesforce, but it isn’t updated after a deal is closed. Now, Tabs can be that source of truth.” 

The Decision

Rob considered Tabs, in addition to other solutions in the market. A major selling point of Tabs was its ease of implementation and onboarding. Other solutions would have required Rob to configure the data structure for contracts in advance, manually entering all of the items that might be sold in a contract. The implementation process could take months.

“With Tabs, you can just upload a PDF and the platform parses all the key terms. That’s incredibly appealing.”

In contrast, Tabs required no manual configuration of contract structures. All Rob would have to do is upload a contract and Tabs would automatically parse the key terms. Initial implementation would be days, not months. 

The Solution

With Tabs, PINATA was able to create a more efficient process for receivables, reduce time spent on manual data entry, and increase the speed of invoicing and collections. 

Payment collection for recurring credit card payments is now automated with Tabs. Creating invoices has also become quicker. Instead of manually extracting key contract details from Salesforce and sending them to an outsourced firm, the Finance team can now simply upload a PDF into Tabs. In fact, they were able to eliminate their outsourced accounting firm, resulting in both cost savings and time savings.

At this phase in PINATA’s growth, the company is innovating and iterating. With Tabs, the Finance team can seamlessly adapt to new contract structures and pricing models without any additional overhead or reconfiguration of the system.

New features are constantly released and available in the Tabs platform. For PINATA, accelerating receivables collection continues to be a priority. As part of the strategy to drive down DSO (Days Sales Outstanding), the Finance team will be using the Tabs dunning and email reminders. 

Looking ahead, Rob is excited about the potential of analyzing the data that is now centralized in the Tabs platform. Being able to view and pull reports on retention and other billing trends within a single system will unlock new insights and opportunities for PINATA’s Finance team.

Impact

• Less time spent on manual data entry
• Money saved from eliminating outsourced accounting firm
• Faster invoice creation and billing