CAE’s revenue operations relied on a combination of Oracle R11, Excel, and Saber for billing and revenue recognition, while Salesforce CRM stored contract data. The finance team manually extracted contract information into spreadsheets to process billings and revenue calculations, leading to inefficiencies and increased risk of errors.

Key pain points included:

• Billing Complexity: 300 invoices per month, with a mix of fixed and variable billing for 300 customers.
• True-ups and Usage-Based Billing: Managing 100 customers with variable billing, true-ups, and usage tracking.
• Revenue Recognition Misalignment: SaaS products aligned with billing, but on-prem solutions required 80% of revenue to be recognized upfront and 20% allocated to post-cutover support (PCS).
• Installation Complexity: For SaaS installations where CAE hosts the products, billing and revenue recognition align. However, for hosted installations, 80% of the revenue on the license is recorded upfront, while 20% of the contract value is amortized over the term—adding complexity that is difficult to handle manually.
• Multi-Currency Complexity: While 99% of transactions were in USD, global operations added complexity to revenue tracking.
• Manual Data Entry: Finance teams manually entered order data, increasing processing time and error rates.

CAE sought an automated approach to streamline billing and revenue recognition. Adopting RightRev’s approach, they focused first on automating standalone billing while extending their CPQ data model to use Order objects. This shift transformed CAE’s contract-to-revenue workflow, eliminating the need for manual extractions and reducing reliance on Excel.

RightRev provided CAE with:

• Automated Billing: Standalone billing automation eliminated manual entry, improving efficiency and accuracy.
• Seamless Revenue Recognition: Automatically aligning revenue policies with contract terms—ensuring upfront and over-time revenue recognition were handled correctly.
• Integration with Existing Systems: RightRev connected seamlessly with Salesforce, feeding accurate data into CAE’s order-to-revenue pipeline.
• Usage-Based Metrics: Revenue calculations dynamically incorporated usage data, ensuring timely and accurate billing adjustments.

With RightRev, CAE achieved significant improvements in their revenue operations:

• Efficiency Gains: Automated processes eliminated manual data entry, reducing errors and processing time.
• Revenue Accuracy: Policies for SaaS, on-prem, hosted installations, and post-cutover services were applied consistently.
• Scalability: CAE’s finance team could now handle complex billing scenarios at scale without increasing manual workload.
• Ideal State Vision: Usage-based billing improvements meant that crew members’ product usage was automatically fed into the billing system, eliminating reconciliation gaps.

RightRev’s integration with CAE’s existing tools ensured accuracy, scalability, and compliance with revenue policies—empowering CAE’s finance team to focus on strategic growth rather than manual reconciliations.