Accurate and efficient revenue recognition with Orb Reporting

The macroeconomic pressures of the last few years have prompted a significant shift in software pricing. To remain competitive, companies have transitioned to hybrid or usage-based models, hoping to better align pricing with customer value. While these changes have benefited customers, they’ve also introduced significant complexity for finance teams managing these innovative pricing structures. 

Why, historically, have finance teams been skeptical of usage-based pricing? 

• Increased risk of accounting errors: Checking terms and manipulating data from complex contracts can make revenue recognition extremely manual, increasing the risk of inaccurate journal entries
• Complex billing and invoicing processes: If contracts include prepaid credit burndowns, rollovers, or pro-rated upgrades/downgrades, accurately invoicing customers becomes a cumbersome task
• Unpredictable revenue streams: It’s tough to know how much a customer is going to use during a billing cycle, so forecasting gets harder
• Potential customer dissatisfaction: Precise and complex pricing structures can result in confusing invoices, which leads to more service requests and longer collection timelines, ultimately impacting customer sentiment.

At Orb, we believe that manually consolidating revenue data from disconnected systems to close the books, recognize revenue, answer customer questions, or understand company performance should squarely be a thing of the past.

That’s why we built Orb Reporting. 

Orb’s data model is uniquely configured to accurately account for every unit of usage at any point in time, for any pricing model.

We’re thrilled to announce a new module within our product that lets you directly see recognized revenue, billings, and deferred revenue tracking in the Orb platform. With updates syncing daily, you gain visibility into the essential financial metrics that allow you to make informed decisions and streamline your accounting processes.  

With Orb Reporting:

Revenue recognition becomes quick and seamless. Orb supports simple compliance with ASC 606 standards, eliminating the need to manually adjust for non-monthly aligned line items, credits, expirations, minimums, discounts, and plan changes.

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‍You can confidently answer questions about invoices—down to a singular usage event. Drill down into the details of any account, invoice, plan, or item with just a few clicks and without pinging your data engineering team.

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You get unprecedented visibility into your various revenue streams. Orb Reporting offers a fresh and consolidated view of your billings, recognized, unbilled, and deferred revenue, all centralized across any time and data horizon.

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You understand your business's financial health: Our filtering and pivoting capabilities allow you to investigate your revenue data, identify and mitigate any potential risks, improve revenue predictability, and learn about what’s driving growth for the company.

After months of close development with our customers, we built Orb Reporting in partnership with finance and accounting teams. The feedback was clear - other tools just fell short. Maxio had a steep learning curve and was not well-suited to handle complex contracts. Stripe is not fundamentally built to handle usage-based billing problems and doesn’t offer enough granularity. Orb’s unique data model is configured explicitly for usage-based billing, and we’ve used it to build a reporting module that delivers accuracy, speed, and visibility to our customers. With Orb Reporting, finance and accounting teams can win more deals, deliver a faster order-to-cash cycle, and retain more customers.  

Orb Reporting has increased the efficiency of our month-end close process. With detailed filtering and real-time updates, we have constant insight into the building blocks of our revenue.”
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_{- Rocco Scartelli, Business Operations and Finance Manager at Materialize}

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We’re not done yet. Orb Reporting will continue evolving, and we invite you to participate in that conversation.

We’re forming a customer advisory board to bring together the most innovative and forward-thinking finance minds. If you’re interested, learn more about the CAB here.