by Joss Poulton, Co-founder & CEO, ClearSync
Being a SaaS CFO is a tough job. You need to unearth and understand risk, play the role of the sober one at the spending party, and often oversee otherwise orphaned functions, such as HR and Operations. At least you’d think revenue reporting would be straightforward since financial systems record transactions precisely.
I’ve witnessed the horror on multiple SaaS CFOs' faces when they’ve logged into Stripe with the goal of producing meaningful SaaS metric reporting. Stripe wasn't built for CFOs — it was built for developers to manage payments. That's a feature, not a flaw. However, it leaves finance teams in the lurch when it comes to producing critical metrics, such as MRR and NRR.
Stripe's reporting capabilities are robust if you’re a data analyst who knows how to write SQL. Then, you can familiarize yourself with its complex object structure and quirks and attempt to extract what you’re looking for using Stripe Sigma. You’ll run into edge cases and workarounds that make reporting on MRR change over time frustratingly complex. I wouldn’t expect a CFO to be able to do that independently.
There are decent free and paid solutions on the market that help CFOs produce better SaaS metric reporting with their Stripe data, such as Profitwell or SaaSGrid. We see these tools as complementary to what we’re building with ClearSync, where our vision is to:
(1) Introduce advanced routing logic to better match Stripe data to HubSpot Contacts and Companies beyond just the Stripe billing email-to-Contact match.
(2) Add two custom objects to HubSpot:
ClearSync Stripe Subscriptions — representing a customer's currently active Subscription footprint and history of any canceled Subscriptions
ClearSync Stripe Events — a multi-faceted child object to Subscriptions that has a categorized record for every single MRR change event. Each time a subscription is created, upgraded, downgraded, or canceled, ClearSync creates an event record in HubSpot and categorizes it to enable detailed reporting.
(3) Once we've delivered advanced routing and high-quality historical data, we plan to integrate HubSpot Deal data more deeply into the Stripe workflow, making it easier than ever for PLG and sales-led motions to work together.
If a customer purchases self-service, we'll determine whether there is an open deal that requires an update or whether one needs to be created, which is crucial for sales ops and sales commission reporting.
Next, we're working on syncing Subscription data with HubSpot Renewal Pipeline Deals, keeping the two in sync to provide CFOs and Customer Success with a clear picture of metrics such as churn and NRR, which they can easily segment using HubSpot reporting.
Rather than having multiple potential sources of truth for MRR change data outside of HubSpot, our goal is to create a unified dataset within HubSpot that Finance, Sales, Customer Success, and data analysts can all collaborate on.
By uniting the billing/subscription management system of record (Stripe) with the customer system of record (HubSpot), CFOs can not only run their own reporting with confidence but can also share and collaborate on key metrics across their GTM team.
If you're a SaaS CFO wrestling with Stripe data, we'd love to hear your experience — or show you what ClearSync is building to help!
