How Collectly Built Revenue Reporting Investors Could Trust with Bridges

Solution

How Bridges Defined ARR Metrics That Could Survive Investor and Internal Scrutiny

Tim split the work into three pieces: choose the right north star metrics, define ARR and CARR precisely enough for a usage-based business, and build a system to report them without manual spreadsheet work.

A Different North Star Metric for Every Team

Tim tested gross revenue, net revenue, and new business booked as candidates for the company's primary metric.

• Found gross revenue overstated the business relative to subscription SaaS peers with similar top-line numbers.
• Found net revenue alone undervalued Collectly relative to its true growth trajectory.
• Assigned new business booked, measured on net revenue, as the one number every team rallied around.

Choosing deliberately mattered more than choosing perfectly: once each team had a clear metric, sales and finance stopped working from different assumptions about the size of the business. That decision still had to hold up against a harder audience — investors who needed ARR and CARR defined on their own terms.

A Precise Definition of ARR for a Business With No Recurring Revenue

Tim built explicit definitions for ARR and CARR that accounted for revenue that was reoccurring by pattern, not guaranteed by contract.

• Required a mutually signed contract before any revenue counted toward CARR.
• Split ARR reporting between clients live over 12 months and clients live under 12 months.
• Defined CARR as ARR plus newly signed and contracted expansion revenue only, excluding anything merely promised.

With ARR and CARR this tightly defined, Collectly's seasonality, strong months in February through April and weak ones in August through October, became a documented pattern instead of a number investors had to take on faith. The next step was making sure those numbers updated themselves.

A Reporting System Built Because No Off-the-Shelf Tool Fit

Tim evaluated traditional revenue automation platforms like Maxio and SaaSOptics, consumption-built tools like Orb and Metronome, and newer accounting platforms like Rillet and Campfire, and found none built for a hybrid subscription and usage-based business like Collectly's.

• Worked with the data science team to connect the CRM, billing system, and QuickBooks into a shared data lake.
• Made accounting the single source of truth feeding every other system, not the CRM.
• Mapped customer-level data so CRM records updated automatically from usage and accounting data, with no manual entry required.

Building that connective layer in-house, instead of forcing the business into a tool designed for someone else's revenue model, is what took reporting from days of manual pulls down to real time.

"We looked at every platform on the market. None of them had ever seen a business shaped like ours, so we built the connections ourselves."

Results

Collectly Now Reports Revenue With a Framework Built for What It Actually Is

Revenue reporting stopped being a multi-day scramble before every board meeting and became infrastructure the company runs on continuously. Investors get rigor on par with subscription SaaS reporting, built for a usage-based revenue model.

• 100% accurate revenue traced to source data — every ARR and CARR figure ties back to a signed contract and actual usage, not an estimate.
• Real-time reporting vs. days of manual pulls — board-ready numbers no longer require pulling sales, accounting, and engineering into a room.
• 50 hours saved managing spreadsheets — eliminating manual entry freed up finance time previously spent on upkeep, not analysis.

What started as a data-integrity problem became the reporting backbone Collectly now uses to talk to investors, align its teams, and defend its valuation against subscription SaaS peers.

"Now when we tell an investor our number, we can also tell them exactly why it's that number. That's the difference between reporting and trust."