We recently sat down with Aptitude Software clients, Brian Dean (T-Mobile,) Kyle Jones (Rogers Communications Inc.,) and Lee Hendrickson (24 Hour Fitness,) to discuss revenue recognition compliance challenges, lessons learned and how they plan to use their post-compliance environment to get ahead.
All three companies offer a subscription, B2C product and manage their revenue recognition with either Aptitude Software’s Revenue Recognition Engine or Aptitude RevStream.
Implementing revenue recognition compliance projects and the new systems and technologies to handle the data and accounting was a big ask for finance and IT teams. Now that these projects are complete, we asked Dean, Jones and Hendrickson to talk about the benefits they are seeing post-compliance. Here are some of their thoughts:
- Assessing business drivers. Now that the revenue data is clear and visible, teams can see how changes to business drivers are impacting numbers.
- Understanding new offer impacts. The ability to forecast how a new offering will impact revenue recognition and then explain (and show) this to key decision makers is key. This enables a more calculated approach to planning products.
- Cleaning up finance systems. At the beginning of this compliance project, most accounting teams believed in the ‘more is better approach.’ Now Jones, at Rogers, describes a “rationalization exercise” with an aim to eventually understanding what data points are needed, so they can really optimize automation capabilities.
- Summarizing data for consumption. Teams external to accounting and finance know the data that is being collected and are ready to see valuable numbers, reports, graphs and analytics. Dean at T-Mobile is looking forward to “sifting through that data and summarizing it in a way that people can easily understand it.”
Thanks so much to our webcast participants for sharing their expertise.
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