How Authenticx set a new gold standard with Mosaic and Maxio
“Every team in our company is going pedal to the metal every day. You have to get it done and always deliver. And that’s why we’ve invested in tools like Mosaic and Maxio, to make sure we demand the same from ourselves that we demand from everybody else in the company.”
Kip Zurcher
CFO, Authenticx
About Authenticx
Authenticx is the new standard for humanizing conversational intelligence in healthcare by analyzing millions of customer interactions (like voice, chat, and emails) to surface immersive and intelligent insights at scale. Authenticx was founded to aggregate, analyze, and activate customer interaction data to surface transformational opportunities in healthcare.
Using existing data that’s likely being stored and ignored in your organization, Authenticx reveals hidden barriers, motivators, and strategies so healthcare organizations can make confident, data-backed decisions. In 2023, Authenticx was ranked No. 349 on the Inc. 5000, recognized as one of America and Indiana’s fastest-growing private companies.
The Challenge
With a seasoned career spanning over 25 years in FP&A and experience at two Fortune 500 companies, Kip Zurcher was well-versed in enterprise-level financial tools. However, when he joined Authenticx as CFO, a rapidly growing tech startup that had just closed its Seed funding, he encountered a new set of challenges. The company’s explosive growth from 10 to 120 employees almost overnight, coupled with a sophisticated product offering and an expanding customer base, put immense pressure on the finance department.
The increasing demands for reporting and analytics from new investors, creditors, and the board required a scalable solution beyond traditional spreadsheets.
“The number of audiences receiving this information and the demands and questions being asked of the finance team was evolving very fast.”
Kip needed a better way to manage billings, payments, and revenue recognition, and to report on GAAP financials and key SaaS metrics like ARR, CAC, retention, and more. “I couldn’t scale more of my time into FP&A. That was a big problem I needed to solve.”
The Solution
The perfect solution–Maxio + Mosaic
Kip embarked on a search for software that could support the company’s new phase of growth. He knew through his previous experiences with other financial software tools that he needed multiple solutions to tackle the different challenges at play. Specifically, he needed one tool to manage ARR, billings, and revenue recognition, and another tool for broader business reporting and forecasting.
Kip chose Maxio as their system of record for managing the ARR, billings, and revenue recognition piece.
Maxio is especially good at handling their sophisticated contract terms, which have varying contract periods and billing and payment schedules. Plus, it automates the complex revenue recognition calculations that come with complex contract terms.
“The sophisticated nature of our contract structures introduces more complexity to the ARR, billings and revenue recognition process. Maxio has been incredibly helpful in serializing and calendarizing that entire process for us.”
Maxio is also especially crucial during renewal season, offering the team visibility into upcoming renewals well in advance of renewal dates so they have plenty of time to work and secure those bookings.
“Now, each time we go into renewal season we’re ahead of the game instead of late to it. It’s a lot less stress, but more importantly it helps us put more renewal bookings on the board…and that’s a win for the entire business.”
Kip chose Mosaic as their source of truth for executive and board reporting, investor presentations, and financial forecasting.
Mosaic’s automated integrations sync data from QuickBooks, HubSpot, and Maxio to power real-time financial and SaaS metrics on-demand at their fingertips. Data visualization tools enable Kip to prepare board and executive presentations in minutes, compared to the days and even weeks it used to take.
He’s also created department-specific KPI dashboards so department leaders can easily understand how they’re performing against plan, giving them ownership of their numbers in a way they never had before. Even the CEO has dashboards in Mosaic to monitor the company’s financial status. “The speed and how clean the dashboards and analysis come out is really the difference maker.”
And Mosaic’s connected 3-statement models and what-if scenarios make it easy to build and update monthly forecasts, run BvA analyses, and experiment with different strategies. “Mosaic is the system of record for forecasting and analytics for anybody in management and above in our company.”
Perfect complements
Together, Mosaic and Maxio offer an end-to-end solution that addresses the full spectrum of Authenticx’s FP&A requirements.
First, contract data like ACV, start date, end date, and billing terms flow directly into Maxio from their Hubspot CRM. Maxio then does all the accounting heavy-lifting, calculating ARR schedules, invoicing customers, and amortizing revenue based on GAAP accounting rules.
From there, that information flows into Mosaic through an automated integration, where it’s brought to life in Mosaic’s beautiful dashboards and reports, and used to build detailed P&L and cash flow forecasts.
Kip also has a clear point of view on optimizing the reporting tools offered by both systems. For Authenticx, Maxio’s reports work really well for the finance folks who need to deep-dive into the accounting details, while Mosaic’s business reporting and dashboarding tools are the perfect complement for broader operational, board, and investor reporting.
For example, Kip’s team uses Maxio to drill down and examine client-specific revenue data and product-level revenue, whereas Mosaic is utilized for higher-level analysis of revenue in more general categories.
“For the finance and accounting people in our team, we live in Maxio for a lot of our day to day reporting needs. When it comes to board reporting packages or any non-finance people, executives, board members or external parties… reporting is done 100% out of Mosaic.”
Implementation best-practices
Reflecting on the successful deployment of Maxio and Mosaic, Kip’s approach was to implement Maxio first, followed closely by Mosaic. This sequence was crucial for establishing a clean foundation of ARR, billings and revenue recognition within Maxio. Once this foundation was set, that financial data could be efficiently fed downstream into Mosaic for broader business reporting and forecasting. In fact, Mosaic recommends this as a best-practice approach because the neatly organized data coming from Maxio makes the Mosaic setup even easier.
Kip also recommends implementing these two tools close together, with the Mosaic implementation following Maxio by only a few weeks. This helps maintain momentum and build a world-class end-to- end process the right way, all in one go.
The Impact
Transformative outcomes with Maxio and Mosaic
The undeniable “wow moment” for Kip was when he got an unexpected request late one afternoon from his investors for a detailed customer cohort analysis…due the next morning.
An exercise that can easily take 8 hours to do in spreadsheets, Kip was able to pull up a dashboard in Mosaic that had all his customer data automatically organized by time cohorts and by associated attributes like ACV, market segment, product line, and more in a matter of minutes. The analysis not only impressed the investors (and instantly became the new gold standard), but also saved his team from what otherwise would have been an all-nighter in the office. “Mosaic earned its mettle on a single call with investors.”
And Kip happily reflects on many similar situations since then. “Mosaic has saved my life more than a few weekends over the last 6 months alone. So my wife thanks you for that.”
Another recent success was when the CEO asked a last-minute tricky question about net retention that she needed for an upcoming keynote speech in front of a giant crowd. “Within 90 seconds I was able to give her the answer while I was on the phone with her. That set the tone for the kind of finance organization we’re aspiring to be.” Now, rapid responses to high-stakes questions from the CEO and investors are the norm and have set a new standard of trust and operational efficiency.
The future looks bright for Authenticx
A corporate finance veteran and a true finance “pro” in every sense, Kip holds himself and his team to an extremely high standard. “Every team in our company is going pedal to the metal every day. You have to get it done and always deliver. And that’s why we’ve invested in tools like Mosaic and Maxio, to make sure we demand the same from ourselves that we demand from everybody else in the company.”
The addition of Mosaic and Maxio at Authenticx has redefined what’s possible for the company’s finance operations. These tools have not only saved significant time and energy but have also enabled Kip’s team to set a new standard of excellence, build trust, and confidence at the highest levels and support the company’s continued growth. Cheers to their success!
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