The Back Office Is Now a Growth Lever

Finance leaders are increasingly being tapped for the top job. In the first half of 2022, 8.1% of CFOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies were promoted to CEO, up from 5.6% a decade earlier, according to Fortune. That shift tracks with Stripe’s own CFO insights report, where 68% of finance leaders said streamlining financial operations is essential to strategic growth and a prerequisite for entering new markets or launching new business models.

Stripe’s answer is its revenue and finance automation suite—modular products including Billing, Revenue Recognition, Data Pipeline, Invoicing, Tax, and Sigma—which integrate with Stripe Payments to cut operating costs while supporting revenue growth. New features announced this week target three areas: growing revenue, streamlining back-office work, and improving financial insights.

Turning Collections and Compliance Into Revenue

The payoff from better back-office systems is measurable. Eighty-seven percent of Stripe invoices are paid within 24 hours, and Billing’s revenue recovery tools helped users recover $2.5 billion in revenue that would otherwise have been lost to churn in the first half of 2023.

New revenue-focused features include:

  • Improved Smart Retries. Stripe Billing uses machine learning to retry failed recurring payments at optimal times based on dynamic signals. The Smart Retries algorithm has improved its recovery rate by 15.5% in 2023. Deliveroo has recovered more than £100 million using these features.
  • Tax in more markets. Stripe Tax now supports 10 additional countries, bringing the total to 50, including all of the EU. That lets businesses sell cross-border while Tax handles collection automatically.
  • Tax for platforms. Platforms using Stripe Connect can now offer Tax as a service to connected accounts, helping their users meet sales tax, VAT, and GST obligations automatically. Thinkific’s vice president of commerce, Peter Fitzpatrick, estimates the company moves twice as fast on Stripe as it would on any other platform.

Consolidating the Finance Stack

The CFO insights report found 63% of finance teams use more than 10 different systems to get a unified view of their financials, and 55% want to consolidate within two years. New features aim to reduce that burden:

  • Email visibility. Stripe Billing can send automated emails on a business’s behalf for support tickets, disputes, refunds, and dunning. New features show users exactly which communications Stripe sent, directly on the customer details page, so teams know when manual intervention is needed.
  • Revenue Recognition enhancements. The report found 45% of finance teams spend more than 10 hours monthly fixing data errors manually. New beta features let users import and manage revenue contracts via the Stripe Billing Connector for Salesforce CPQ, customize their chart of accounts, and use Revenue Recognition on Stripe Connect for platform-based businesses.
  • Deeper Salesforce integration. Two new features bring the total Stripe Connectors with Salesforce to five. The Salesforce CPQ Connector imports and manages revenue contracts; the Stripe for Salesforce Platform app synchronizes Stripe data and lets users create custom flows with Billing and Tax inside Salesforce. Polygon.io moved seven years of data—nearly one million Stripe events—into a new Salesforce environment in two weeks without data gaps.
  • Billing migrations. The migration toolkit lets businesses move existing subscriptions from homegrown or third-party systems to Stripe Billing in a few clicks, with end-to-end tracking and no double billing or subscription disruption. More than $300 million in subscriptions have been migrated so far this year. Keap consolidated more than 20 payment providers with Stripe, then launched Tax in eight weeks after an unsuccessful six-month attempt with another solution.

Better Data for Faster Decisions

Revenue data scattered across disconnected systems is hard to analyze. Data Pipeline offers the simplest way to view Stripe data in a data warehouse, where it can be queried alongside other business information. The service now supports 14 additional Snowflake and Redshift warehouse regions worldwide, helping businesses identify regional insights like best-performing payment methods. Lime used Data Pipeline to reduce time-to-data into Snowflake by 67% and eliminate efforts spent verifying data inaccuracies.

Modular by Design

The suite works as a whole or as individual components. X (formerly Twitter) and Roblox use Billing and Tax; OpenAI uses Billing, Tax, and Revenue Recognition. Patricia Lue, head of revenue accounting and operations at OpenAI, credits Stripe with enabling flexible subscription options—monthly and credit-based pay-as-you-go for ChatGPT and the API—plus automated tax reporting at month-end.