Über 10.000 Transaktionen pro Monat: Einblicke in Pitchs effizientes Abrechnungssystem und Tipps für Newcomer SaaS-CFOs
Marco: Michael, I’m glad you’re talking to us today. Pitch your company.
Michael: In today’s visually saturated world, you are judged by the way you show up. Whether you are a business striving to stay relevant or an individual preparing for a job interview, your success depends on how you present yourself.
That presentation, of course, starts with an idea. But bridging the gap between the power of your imagination and the ability to turn it into reality is not always easy. That is what Pitch is about.
If the future of business is visual, presentations are the best way to turn an idea in your head into a movement that captures hearts and changes minds.
Today’s tools and formats stifle creativity, encourage dull voiceover monologues, and are shared as dead documents. To break free from these constraints, you need technical and design skills — and a lot of time.
We have rebuilt the medium of presentations from the ground up to enable freedom of expression and creative collaboration. With Pitch, teams can create compelling stories in the blink of an eye, turn static documents into dynamic assets, and literally see their ideas succeed.
In a high-stakes, high-visibility world, we are giving ideas a greater chance to connect and come to life.
Marco: Sounds like a big vision; what can you tell us about the size of Pitch?
Michael: We are a 36-member remote team with roots in Berlin, where the majority of the team members are based, but our customer base is global, with the US being our biggest market.
We currently serve more than 2M teams, with over 400K active presentations created each month.
Marco: How does your billing work for several thousand customers?
Michael: We have a subscription-based model with three tiers. Everyone starts on the Free plan, and you can unlock additional features by upgrading to the Pro or Business plans. The upgrade process is completed in a web checkout form. Parts of this are custom-built, and parts of this are leveraging Stripe Elements to produce forms that are geographically relevant for our customers based on their location.
A customer subscribes to a certain number of seats for either a monthly or annual period, based on the number of editors in their workspace, and pays for this using a credit card. We currently offer localized transactions in USD, EUR, and GBP. Provided the transaction clears our fraud checks and is successfully charged, the customer receives their new plan and its features.
When a customer wants to add more members, we edit this subscription and bill them on a pro-rata basis during the next monthly renewal, or the monthly anniversary of an annual subscription. Subscription renewals are therefore happening all the time and are spread out during a month- or year-long period, with some seasonality involved.
If a customer fails to pay their renewal invoice, we largely automate the debt collection process and provide a small grace period for them to correct this, before downgrading them to the Free plan again.
Marco: What factors were decisive when choosing StripeBilling?
Michael: The flexibility it offers. You can either really fine-tune your billing and subscription management to your needs, or take it at its face value. This is especially important when your customer base is a mix of self-serve and sales-led customers that might need a bit more fine-grained tweaking.
The back-office functionality is really simple for all types of customer-facing teams to work with, within their allocated permissions.
The regular updates and improvements that Stripe and Stripe Billing bring to their product mean that we are building a monetization engine that is at the forefront of flexibility and customer-centricity. That allows us to manage and mitigate fraudulent activities. It only means that we can keep the team lean and focus our engineering resources mostly on our product rather than on deploying proper billing practices.
Marco: How does the accounting work at Pitch as a state-of-the-art SaaS company? From your point of view, when does in-house vs. outsourcing accounting make sense?
Michael: Since Pitch is fairly small in terms of headcount and the number of different types of transactions, we can operate with a small internal team and outsource the majority of our accounting tasks. While we fully own and control the preparatory accounting and billing processes as well as the management reporting, we have completely outsourced payroll, accounting, and tax. Since we still have more than 10K single transactions per month, we can only operate in such a lean fashion by pushing for automation and introducing software where possible. Without tools like Finway on the AP side and Stripe and pathway on the AR side, we would probably require at least 3–4 FTEs to manually generate and process data for the various accounting tasks.
Marco: What are your top 3 recommendations to newcomers among SaaS CFOs?
Michael: There are numerous learnings I have gathered during the last years, but let me try to condense them to the three most important ones:
- Be curious, self-reflective, and never stop learning:
This does not only apply to newcomers but to anyone who wants to succeed in their role. It sounds a little obvious, but I think continuous learning is essential to succeeding in your job, especially in today’s time when new tools and technologies are introduced almost every day, more than ever. The role of the CFO has changed massively over the last decade, and all jobs in finance will continue to evolve. Rather than being left behind, it is important to embrace that change and, ideally, try contributing to it. - Build up a strong network and invest in it:
No matter what your academic background is or what you did in the past, there is only so much you can know. Likely, you are not the first person facing a certain problem. Rather than spending too much time finding your own solutions, build up your network of peers that you can exchange ideas with, learn from, and support to become successful as well. An extra to this is that other SaaS CFOs are actually really cool to hang around with, and maybe you will make some new friends as well. :) - Invest in automation and build up a strong team:
Probably one of the biggest mistakes I made in my first CFO role at Personio was that I waited too long to build up a team and tried to handle too many projects myself for too long. While you might be very capable of doing that, this will not scale for long, and, assuming that your company grows successfully, you will soon create a bottleneck in the organization and not be able to focus on the value-adding strategic work the company hired you for. Thus, if a task needs to be done twice, consider how it can be digitized or fully automated. If there are strong signals that complexity and business volume are rising, start thinking about how to design your org and which key roles to hire first to maximize the outcome for both you and your organization.
