Place Customer Stories: How Stoplight Uses Place to Make Great Decisions Faster

Stoplight is a collaborative API design platform that integrates seamlessly into your existing workflows to enable all stakeholders working with APIs to be more productive. At its core, Stoplight is a development tool that helps companies create an API smarter and faster.

Stoplight has been using Place since December 2020 when they realized they needed a smarter and faster way to forecast into the future and make data-informed decisions faster. They needed a tool that could do what they were doing in Excel with the scalability and flexibility necessary while integrating with their existing tech stack (QuickBooks and Salesforce). As a growth-minded organization, they also wanted to eliminate silos between the finance and the rest of the company.

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Better Hiring Decisions

Hiring employees has never been easier

Being unable to forecast into the future hindered Stoplight’s abilities to make decisions with hiring since the majority of their CapEx is spent on people. Having PlaceCPM provided the ability to see very quickly how increasing headcount would affect their cash reserves and P&L..

“We couldn’t act quickly enough in order to hire someone. I was tentative in making a decision without running the numbers. I wanted to have just a better way, a scalable way to remain lean in our department. That's why I started looking down the tool path and came across Place.”  said Brandon Somers, CFO at Stoplight.

How does the company feel about PlaceCPM?

For me, I needed a tool that just made my job easier, so that is a giant relief. But from overarching, like, how does the company feel about this, our CEO has told me, this is his favorite tool that I have procured since he's been here. He really loves PlaceCPM because of the ability to just see how we're doing and understand what our forecast was versus what our actuals are, and being able to layer in a budget as well over all of that to see what the deltas are in that aspect as well. He's just really excited about where we are and the ability to see for himself how we're doing from an FP&A perspective.

Forecasts in financials every month

Allows for a clear view of your P&L forecast and your cash projections in real-time

Stoplight is using Place to plan and forecast headcount. They add new headcount or forecast new headcount on a daily basis, as well as make sure that any new contract added through Salesforce is added to their revenue lines, and is being recognized appropriately or forecasted appropriately. As well as any new vendor expenses that come in, or changes to current vendor expenses that come in, Stoplight is updating those as well to understand in real-time what that looks like for their cash as well as their P&L.

What are the major results of using PlaceCPM at Stoplight?‍

Some of the major results are being able to put future employees in here and see how that affects our revenue numbers. Also how it's allowed us to make sure that we're doing the right things from an ASC 606 perspective from a revenue recognition and a commission accrual perspective. PlaceCPM validates both of those concerns for us and allows us to know that we're doing the right things in accounting as well.

The benefits have been for us to be able to scale as a department and be able to accurately forecast our financials in a scalable way. We're benefiting from the cash projection aspects of the tool to be able to understand that takes me away from a spreadsheet that I used to have to update manually every week to be able to run future sets of financials out to investors. I would say PlaceCPM has increased our productivity by a factor of two x at least making our job more efficient and making the need to copy and paste into multiple spreadsheets a thing of the past.

Weekly cash projections

What used to take hours now takes minutes

Financial data siloed in QuickBooks hindered Spotlight’s ability to grow as a company because it didn’t give the team the ability to look forward, it just gave them the ability to look at what they were currently doing as well as what they did in the past.

Before Stoplight bought Place, forecasting and planning was done in spreadsheets. Stoplight would take the data out of QuickBooks and copy and paste it into Excel. They had other tabs that had future forecasting abilities around people, comp, and non-comp expenses. Stoplight would have to keep that updated, as well as keep a detailed weekly cash spreadsheet updated.

What sets Place apart from its competitors?

What sets it apart is the clean integration with Salesforce and QuickBooks. The fact that it's a layer on top of Salesforce and has the ability to just make your revenue that all lives inside Salesforce smarter. Essentially, it allows you to forecast forward and allows you to see what's happening in the business in real-time. I like the ability to see the difference.

I like the ability to see what the year will end up at, and I like to be able to see monthly, where we hit the forecast or where we didn't hit the forecast. To therefore just be able to better forecast and be a better prognosticator of how we will finish the year and how we will do in a certain quarter when not.

Would you recommend PlaceCPM?

I would absolutely recommend PlaceCPM to others because it helps CFOs and Controllers be able to really forecast what has happened in the business and allows for an understanding of financials in real-time based on what deals are closing in the pipeline and what things are happening in the business.

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