How Sprinto compounds insight with every Drivetrain integration

Sprinto's product runs on a simple idea. One signal about a company's security posture does not tell you much. Hundreds of them, gathered continuously and read together, tell you what is actually at risk and what to do about it. That’s what Sprinto does. It monitors its customers’ systems to keep them safe, secure, and compliant.

When Jay Parekh joined Sprinto to lead FP&A, he wanted to apply that same logic to Sprinto's finances, to keep them healthy and leverage the company’s financial data to help the company grow. He was confident that he could achieve that because Sprinto was using Drivetrain, a comprehensive FP&A platform he’d used in a previous role and already knew well.

With Drivetrain already on board, Parekh arrived at Sprinto fully expecting to hit the ground running, using it for deep financial analysis and rapid reporting. What he found instead was that he still had a lot of work to do…

The finance team was using Drivetrain primarily for financial consolidation. Sprinto’s VP Finance had purchased Drivetrain because the company has two entities, one in India and the other in the US. With two accounting systems and multiple currencies, consolidation was the main problem he needed to solve. Like Parekh, the VP Finance had also used Drivetrain at a previous company and brought it to Sprinto to solve the same problem. And it did a great job.

Parekh knew that with a tool like Drivetrain, he could do much more. "Consolidation was the first use case and the basic use case we had," he said. Basic. By connecting all of Sprinto’s data systems to Drivetrain, he could unlock powerful insights that could help grow the business faster.

For Parekh, the most interesting questions from a financial perspective, such as who's about to churn, which invoices are actually at risk and why, lived in five disconnected systems. Sales and customer data lived in HubSpot. Support ran on Freshdesk. Subscriptions and invoicing ran through Tabs. India's books were in Zoho Books, the US in QuickBooks. Each of those systems produces useful reports for the teams that use them. Any one of them could tell him something true. None of them could tell him what was at risk.

From a practical perspective, having the data finance needs siloed in different systems also made financial reporting and addressing leadership’s questions a lot harder.

Revenue performance, split across sources

Like every finance leader, Parekh wanted to understand the company's revenue performance. Sprinto was growing. Any report could tell him that. But he wanted more visibility into what was driving it. Some segments retain better than others, some regions convert better than others, and growth in one can hide a leak in another.

Building those views requires data sitting in different systems. What a customer is worth, and how that changed over the period, comes from the subscription system. Which segment and region that customer belongs to, and which rep closed the deal, comes out of HubSpot. Until those two things sit in the same place, the total is about all he could see.

An invoice with nobody's name on it

Thinking about all those unanswered questions, Parekh said the clearest example of the problem was accounts receivable. He explained that because Sprinto is an SMB-focused business, at any given time, there are a lot of customers with a lot of invoices sitting inside its subscription management system. While he could always see the outstanding balance, he couldn't see what was behind it.

Parekh put it this way, “If there are $2 million in invoices outstanding, who do you chase besides the customer?”

HubSpot had part of what he needed. It records which account executive, account manager and CSM are assigned to each account, how the implementation is going, and whether the customer is happy. The invoices were in Tabs. But they weren’t connected, which meant the finance team had to export the data from both to Google Sheets and match each invoice to its associated account manually.

This took a lot of hours each month. But the question nagged Parekh: what was that process hiding? An unpaid invoice from a delighted customer and an unpaid invoice from one who is frustrated and very close to churning look the same in a spreadsheet, yet they’re two completely different problems.

Parekh came into Sprinto knowing what Drivetrain could do, and he had a vision for the kind of system he was building toward. The answers to all of his questions relied on integrating all the necessary systems with Drivetrain to provide a single source of truth and the capabilities he needed to turn that connected data into insight.

The foundation was already in place: Drivetrain was already holding Sprinto's two sets of books in one place and reconciling them every month. And since Drivetrain offered native integrations for all the systems he needed to connect, he was able to build on that foundation quickly.

Revenue, sliced every way it needs slicing

Parekh started where finance and sales overlap, joining Sprinto's subscription data to HubSpot so revenue could be cut by segment, by region, and by rep.

"We started tracking and monitoring performance in terms of how new bookings look like across segments, regions, channels . It was a core RevOps use case." ~ Jay Parekh, FP&A Lead, Sprinto

A unified view of customer health informing three different teams

With HubSpot data now in Drivetrain, Parekh had the data necessary to see how actively the CS team was engaging accounts. Connecting Freshdesk to Drivetrain gave him visibility into the support side. He could see how each agent was performing against SLA thresholds, and whether those thresholds were being met or breached. He could see ticket volumes by day, week, and month, and the reasons tickets were opened in the first place.

Now, tickets are grouped into different categories, and billing is one of them. Billing is one of those categories, so when AR-driven tickets begin to pile up, Parekh can see why.

With all the data in Drivetrain, Parekh can slice it by whatever dimension he needs (by agent, by support bucket, or by account) to answer his questions. Today, he runs those reports daily and weekly, delivering data-driven insights to the CS and support teams at the same time.

"The reports are definitely available in Freshdesk, but what Drivetrain helps us do is concentrate everything on a single dashboard, on a single piece." ~ Jay Parekh, FP&A Lead, Sprinto

A name and a reason on every invoice

Parekh was also able to solve the invoice problem by integrating Tabs with Drivetrain. Tabs and HubSpot share a common link ID, so now, merging the data from both systems is possible.

"I'm able to merge those two datasets and fetch data from HubSpot in terms of who is the account manager for this customer, who is the CSM, who is the account executive. I want all those three details." ~ Jay Parekh, FP&A Lead, Sprinto

That merge put a name against every outstanding invoice, along with enough context to know what kind of problem each one was. Now Parekh can characterize the risk more accurately, distinguishing customers who aren't happy from those who are simply slow to pay. An unhappy customer needs a conversation with their CSM. A slow payer needs a reminder from whoever owns the account. Both are visible in the same place.