Customer Highlights
How Upwell Scaled Their Revenue Operations with Maple
We're excited to partner with Upwell, an AR automation platform for logistics, built to help customers streamline invoicing, collections, and cash flow.
As the company geared up for higher growth, it became clear that their billing infrastructure was creating unnecessary friction. They were using a simplified CPQ to handle contracts and invoicing, which was a good fit at first, but became increasingly limiting as their operational complexity grew.
The Upwell team needed a revenue platform that could scale with them, integrate with their finance and payments stack, and reduce the manual work for their operations and finance teams.
Challenge
While their initial CPQ solution worked well early on, especially for the sales team, it was not built to handle Upwell's evolving finance and operations needs.
The QuickBooks sync was particularly problematic, especially with credits and invoice adjustments being misclassified. This created inaccurate financials and forced Upwell's accounting partner, Zeni, to spend extra time cleaning data every month. Contract management was also inefficient, any small error in a contract, like a billing date or name typo, required voiding and recreating the entire agreement, as there was no way to edit or issue amendments.
Invoice tracking became a challenge due to automatically generated, unreadable invoice numbers that could not be customized. This made it difficult to track payments both internally and with customers.
The reporting capabilities were overly simplistic, forcing the team to manually put together key metrics like MRR or contract pipeline.
Payment processing was also limited, with their initial CPQ solution only supporting ACH and checks without customization of integration with other payment processors.
Solution
Upwell switched to Maple to streamline their billing and finance operations, along with a sales team friendly CPQ.
In particular, a clean QuickBooks sync now pushes detailed invoice data, tax mapping, discounts, and payments accurately and automatically. Contract management is now flexible, with support for editing and amendments without needing to void agreements.
Invoice management has become streamlined with customizable invoice number formatting, improving internal workflows and customer conversations. The built-in reporting provides real-time visibility into MRR, churn, active subscriptions, and more, eliminating the need for spreadsheets.
Payment processing and pricing models are more flexible, with support for card-on-file, ACH, emailed net terms, and check payments, all with the future possibility of integrating with processors that solve Upwell's specific needs.
Results
Since switching to Maple, Upwell has:
- Eliminated Manual Work: With hours of monthly reconciliation work with Zeni.
- Streamlined Operations: For contract and billing operations for the ops team.
- Improved Collections: With better payment options, pricing models and automated workflows.
- Gained Visibility: With real-time revenue data to support forecasting and fundraising.
"It's been really great to have streamlined Quickbooks sync that tracks revenue and payments accurately. We're able to make changes to contracts and invoices quickly and easily, and the reporting is a huge improvement over what we had before."
Conclusion
The initial CPQ solution helped Upwell get started, but it was limiting for a larger sales team and finance operations.
Upwell's AR automation platform is now backed by a billing system designed to handle the complexity of modern logistics workflows, from flexible contracts to finance-grade integrations.