Zuora RevPro Helps Poly Automate Revenue Recognition and Unlock New Business Growth

Zuora, Inc., (NYSE:ZUO) the leading cloud-based subscription management platform provider, announced today that Poly, the global communications leader and merger of Polycom and Plantronics, is using Zuora® RevPro® to replace its manual financial processes with an automated revenue recognition solution. As a result, Poly has reduced time to close the books, minimized its compliance risk, and gained real-time insights to unlock new business growth strategies -- something the company’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) system was incapable of supporting.

The CFO role has changed. It’s not just about balancing the books. Finance is now a strategic business partner, tasked with providing real-time financial data to inform critical business decisions. In PwC’s “Confidence in the Future” report, CFOs cited that their teams spend half of their time gathering data. Automation offers an alternative—potentially reducing that time and cost by 46 percent for key processes, according to the same report. Furthermore, PwC’s “2019 Risk in Review” study cited that 76 percent of companies embracing automation are able to make better decisions, 72 percent have improved the customer experience, and 66 percent are meeting or exceeding expectations of revenue growth.

Manual revenue recognition processes were affecting Poly, hindering comprehensive real-time visibility into the company’s financial performance. With a strategic objective to scale its suite of global communications, including video conferencing, business headsets, voice solutions, and customer-centric services, Poly needed more reliable financial operations to ensure the business could focus on powering authentic collaboration and connection among teams in today’s global, distributed workforce.

“We had always been in discussions with our auditors about the level of granularity for our revenue allocations to help drive business needs. But we had to admit that it just wasn’t practical for us because we didn’t have the systems to support it,” said Chris Gomez, Senior Manager, Revenue Operations at Poly. “With Zuora RevPro, however, we gained the real-time insight we needed to eliminate manual financial barriers, provide a critical level of detail in reporting, and ultimately make informed business decisions.”

Prior to using Zuora, Poly manually allocated revenue for hundreds of thousands of complex sales contracts with multiple performance obligations via spreadsheets -- a time-intensive and error-prone process offering little visibility into critical financial data until month-end when journal entries were already booked. Subsequently, revenue forecasting and the production of management reports was delayed. As Poly began its ERP implementation, the company realized that traditional ERP and spreadsheets weren’t enough to handle the complexities of their growing business. Poly needed a cloud-based application that could both streamline manual processes and seamlessly interoperate with its ERP system.

“With Zuora RevPro, we were able to dramatically reduce the time spent on management reporting by automating our revenue recognition. Not only are we able to accurately calculate margins and forecast revenue by product line in real-time with a readily available dashboard, we now also have the insights we need to advise the business on the right pricing decisions while maintaining ASC606 compliance,” continued Gomez.

Poly’s Senior Manager, Revenue Operations, Chris Gomez and Plantronics’ and Sr. Director, Revenue Accounting and Operations, John Benavides, will speak at today’s Subscribed for RevRec event.

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora provides the leading cloud-based subscription management platform that functions as a system of record for subscription businesses across all industries. Powering the Subscription Economy®, the Zuora platform was architected specifically for dynamic, recurring subscription business models and acts as an intelligent subscription management hub that automates and orchestrates the entire subscription order-to-cash process, including billing and revenue recognition. Zuora serves more than 1,000 companies around the world, including Box, Rogers, Schneider Electric, Xplornet and Zendesk. Headquartered in the Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices around the world in the U.S., EMEA and APAC. To learn more about the Zuora platform, please visit www.zuora.com.

© 2019 Zuora, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Zuora, Subscribed, Subscription Economy, Powering the Subscription Economy, and Subscription Economy Index are trademarks or registered trademarks of Zuora, Inc. Third party trademarks mentioned above are owned by their respective companies. Nothing in this press release should be construed to the contrary, or as an approval, endorsement or sponsorship by any third parties of Zuora, Inc. or any aspect of this press release.

SOURCE: Zuora Financial

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including but not limited to statements regarding the expected growth and trends in the financial sector and the expected growth and trends in the market for subscription businesses or revenue automation, and the expected benefits of any such trends. Any statements that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied in forward-looking statements. This press release also includes market data and certain other statistical information and estimates from industry analysts and/or market research firms. Zuora believes these third party reports to be reputable, but has not independently verified the underlying data sources, methodologies or assumptions. Information that is based on estimates, forecasts, projections, market research or similar methodologies is inherently subject to uncertainties and actual events or circumstances may differ materially from events and circumstances reflected in this information.

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