Vitally was built from the ground up to support and enable best-in-class Customer Success productivity. But supercharging CSMs is only part of the story. Vitally can benefit other critical departments, who can use our platform to leverage customer data and create exceptional experiences beyond Customer Success.

With the help of Peggy Wang, Vitally’s Head of Finance, and Vitally Sales Manager Carly Bennett Hickey, let’s look at how two other key areas of your business — finance and billing — can benefit from making Vitally a key part of your tech stack, not only in keeping a finger on the pulse of your business health but also by helping you proactively monitor the status of client accounts.

Financial Forecasting

You can’t make informed decisions on growth, staffing, or investments without an accurate picture of your company's health. That’s why finance teams can turn the power of Vitally inward — using data from our platform to add depth to financial forecasting. 

One way to do that is by building your own Finance Hub. Peggy Wang created her own custom dashboard of reports to track revenue changes over time, monitor real-time customer metrics, and make decisions based on these insights.

"We use Vitally as the source of truth for ARR, GRR, and NRR — this usually lives outside CRMs for most companies in a finance-managed spreadsheet somewhere — to make sure the finance team is aligned with the rest of the company,” Peggy says. 

Let’s break down the three dashboards in Peggy’s Blueprint that can serve as a jumping off point for finance leaders:

• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Peggy is able to see the breakdown of ARR over time, customer count over time, and monthly changes in expansion, contraction, churn, and new business ARR. As a result, she has visibility into Vitally’s exact revenue numbers and can rely on them for accurate forecasting and reporting.
• Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)/Net Revenue Retention (NRR): Similar to ARR tracking, this Dashboard acts as the source of truth for retention numbers at Vitally. In addition to being able to see retention numbers over time, Peggy has also built various custom reports that allow her to see historical churn based on customer tier and identify any patterns in different customer groups.
• Churn & Risk: This Dashboard offers the latest view on churn/expansion/contraction forecasts for the next few months which are used in Vitally's financial projections. Vitally’s Account Management team also uses Vitally to track and update churn forecasts, which Peggy can then report on in a Churn & Risk Dashboard. No more need to constantly reach out to your AMs to get updated churn forecasts!

Grab the Blueprint now and learn more about how to gain visibility into key financial metrics, quickly identify areas of risk and opportunities, and effectively forecast revenue in Vitally.

Client Billing

You probably don’t need us to tell you how important an efficient and synchronized billing process is for reducing churn and providing more value to your customers. No one has the time to chase delinquent accounts, and missing key milestones in your client’s lifecycle can leave you looking less than your best.

With Vitally onboard, your billing process becomes automated, repeatable, and efficient for your CS and finance teams. Here are three ways our team uses Vitally to make key billing processes, like payment status and renewals, become far more efficient. 

1. Status Tracking

Whether it’s a high-touch, scaled low-touch, or a hybrid-touch scenario, your finance and billings teams still need to be aware of a client’s payment status. But manual look-ups and updates burn a lot of time on low-level repetitive tasks. Vitally automates that process, providing teams with always up-to-date table reports of upcoming renewals. 

Peggy sees Vitally as a crucial way to gain much-needed context before reaching out to delinquent clients. “Finance teams can use Vitally as a hub for contract/procurement/next renewal details and click into conversations to get context as to why a customer payment is late."

Need more info at a glance? Vitally offers automated alerts on individual accounts to know when a particular account is coming up for renewal. 

2. Renewal Dashboards

Quickly flip data tables into customer account dashboards the whole team can use, and parse the info by ARR or renewal date to look at "at-risk ARR" or "expansion-ripe accounts" by cross-referencing revenue data with customer health data.

For more complex renewal motions, you can build team-based Vitally projects for internal stakeholders that bring together project templates to keep everything on track. For example, six months before renewal, you can automatically assign your multi-step project plan to guide your post-sale team through securing that renewal. 

“A CSP like Vitally can be extremely helpful as a living playbook for how teams can do their job,” Carly Bennet-Hickey says. “You can combine best practice documentation and all the information on how to actually get the customer from A to B in one easy to find place.”

3. Payment Alerts

Vitally can be used to deploy automated alerts about client payments to the relevant people — and only the relevant people. Whether it’s an automatic email reminder to a customer or an internal alert task created for a CSM/AM/finance team member (in case they need to engage with a customer personally), you can simply set up actions for whoever might need to know when a payment is missed.

(And since Vitally tracks revenue sources from common billing platforms, you can automatically alert your customers via email whenever a credit card is about to expire or has already expired).

Revenue Source Integrations

Vitally’s integrations are some of the most comprehensive on the market today, and enhance our platform’s ability to track and pull financial, revenue, and billing information from a wide range of sources you won’t typically find elsewhere. This helps your finance and billing teams avoid the complexity of setting up or tracking down additional bolt-on solutions to bring in your revenue sources.

With Vitally, not only will you be able to effortlessly sync your financial data from sources like Salesforce or Hubspot, but you’ll have native support for platforms like Chargebee, Recurly, and Stripe. 

For Carly, this is a pretty big advantage Vitally has over other platforms. “Revenue integrations are the source of truth for revenue, churn, etc., so they provide the most accurate picture of a customer's current revenue and subscription/billing status.”

“Without native billing integration to your particular source, you're likely to rely on some sort of manual process for revenue tracking through your CRM or data warehouse, which is much more prone to fail.”

Extra Credit: Bridging the Gap Between CS and Finance

Want to go deeper? We’ve got you covered! Peggy Wang and Vitally’s CEO and Co-Founder Jamie Davidson hosted a webinar alongside Andrea Kayal, CRO at Help Scout, diving into best practices around getting your Customer Success and Finance teams on the same page, and how that alignment ultimately benefits the customer. 

A Top-Rated CSP for Finance, Billing, and Beyond

We’re excited to show you everything Vitally's Customer Success Platform has to offer that can help you maximize impact for your teams, customers, and business. Take a quick interactive tour of our platform to get started!