Zuora Subscribed Recap: “Welcome to the New World of Happy Businesses”

Nice recap of some of the highlights of Subscribed London 2017 posted by Subscribed sponsors Xactly. Originally published on Xactly’s blog by Lucy Hudson.

Recently, at London’s iconic venue Tobacco Dock, Xactly had the pleasure of sponsoring Zuora Subscribed London, Zuora’s network of events aimed at connecting a community dedicated to best practice sharing and learning around the subscription economy.

The event kick-started with General Manager of EMEA John Phillips, who introduced the audience to Zuora and recapped their journey so far with over 1,000 customers and operations in over 28 different countries.

Zuora’s CEO Tien Tzuo share the stage with both John Ingram, CEO of Mortgage Gym, and Thomas Bucklar, Director of IoT and Digital for Caterpillar. Together, they demonstrated that subscriptions are most certainly not limited to the Spotifys and the Netflixs of the world and that this billing model is pretty much applicable to every vertical sector around the world.

For me, however, the recurring theme of #Subscribed17 was the subject of IFRS 15 (the International Financial Reporting Standard), which is coming soon! January 1st, to be precise.

Theresa Germellou from Deloitte and Jagan Reddy from RevPro’s informative session touched on the complexities of the new standards, the risks concerning back office compliance and whether this could constrain businesses from a growth perspective and that if the auditors sign everything off, then great! But if not, it then becomes necessary to dig a little deeper into the contracts and manipulate the data to get to the right answer.

It was fortuitous that our own Erik Charles, Xactly’s VP of Product Marketing, then joined Sloat, and Colm O’Monachain from JP Morgan in a CFO Roundup deep dive session to continue the discussions on this very subject.

Erik reviewed the implications of IFRS15 and how it will impact the sales commission process due to new expense accounting treatments. He discussed what IFRS15 will mean to businesses and how to better understand what is needed to be compliant.

And while it’s not straightforward by any stretches of the imagination, he shared some easy-to-understand examples of how the way we account for commission expenses will change when the new requirements come to play, and ultimately how businesses will be facing a vast amount of complexity in managing commission accounting processes moving forwards. It was standing room only, but it was clear from the questions that were flowing, that this is a hot topic for everyone right now and we need to be prepared—and fast!

It was a truly informative day, but what made it so great to be involved with this event is the fact that we know each other so well, our products are so complimentary, and we are mutual clients of each other. As our own Chris Cabrera said, “With Zuora, our billing system is a whole order of magnitude better than what we had before.” And Tyler Sloat, Zuora’s CFO says of Xactly “we can add different plans, we can track things easily, we can compensate in different methodologies, and we can get all of that information through to Salesforce CRM.”

The event was nicely topped off at the reception networking drinks where the truly excellent traveling band personalized Pharrell Williams’ global hit, substituting the word ‘Happy’ to ‘Xactly’: “Cos we’re Xactly…Clap along if you feel that happiness is the truth…”

Read more about ASC 606 and IFRS 15: How the New Revenue Standards Will Impact Subscription Companies.

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