Mixpanel is a global product analytics software provider that serves more than 26,000 companies from different industries worldwide, including Twitter, Expedia, and Ancestry. The company helps its customers understand how and why their users engage, convert, and retain in real-time across web, mobile, and smart devices. In turn, Mixpanel’s customers can use that data to improve their business and products.

As Mixpanel grew its customer base, the company’s finance team found itself spending more and more time manually creating orders for new sales contracts. “We were struggling to scale our order-to-cash process as our business grew. This process required significant manual effort from the team to reconcile closed-won contract information between our CRM and our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system,” says Controller Kara Barcelon. “We need reliable sales order data in our ERP to ensure that all of our revenue is accurately recognized for financial reporting and accounting purposes.” 

The Mixpanel team needed to find a way to keep pace with incredible business growth without committing all of its resources to data entry. “At an organization like ours, no one is going to wait around for someone else to solve their problems. My team might not be data integration experts, but we’re solutions seekers, and we knew there was a better way to handle repetitive processes so that we could focus on more-strategic financial work.”

Mixpanel was no stranger to integration solutions. Its systems team had previously adopted a well-recognized, 20-year-old software tool to handle some of its integration needs. But it was ultimately expensive, slow-moving, and unwieldy. As the team evaluated different alternatives, it focused on finding a solution that even line-of-business users with no integration experience could use to build their own processes.

Mixpanel chose Tray Universal Automation Cloud to scale its order-to-cash processes and create efficiencies across the organization. “We found a solution that both our engineers and our non-technical teammates could agree on. Tray armed our organization with the ability not just to innovate our financial processes, but automate manual work across our entire revenue team.”

Mixpanel cites Tray.ai’s customer success organization as a critical factor in its swift implementation process. “Not only did the support team help bring us up-to-speed with using the platform, but they’ve been real partners in architecting our processes. Often, we’ll use the Tray team as a sounding board to find out how to make our workflows even more efficient. It’s great to work with a team that genuinely cares about our success.”

Now, virtually the entire revenue team at Mixpanel is enjoying the benefits of automation.

“After we introduced automation into our order-to-cash process, we noticed a 25% reduction in the manual effort required to complete a sales order,” remarks Barcelon. “Instead of reconciling every order, my team now only needs to review incoming orders and make adjustments as needed. This process, in turn, has allowed us to refocus on other mission-critical financial and accounting projects.”

Moving forward, the team at Mixpanel plans to innovate and automate new areas of the organization. “We want to embrace automation in all the ways we can,” says Barcelon. “Today, people just don’t know what they can achieve with the right tools. Honestly, we’ve changed the way we approach our work. Instead of just using a project-to-project approach as a traditional finance team might, we look at our work from the standpoint of how we can build out automation to get things done. We’ve already used automation to clear some of the biggest obstacles we’d faced, and now we look at projects and prioritize them for our next automation builds.”

“Automation has fundamentally changed our approach to building processes,” says Barcelon. “You’re not limited to the capabilities of any one system. So far, we have yet to find something that Tray can’t do.”