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Sara Honeycutt doesn't shy away from complex challenges. Her latest challenge? Restating five years of revenue for a company processing 400,000 transactions across both PLG and enterprise motions—all while preparing for a major acquisition. This is her story.
When Sara joined Copy.ai, she inherited what many finance leaders at fast-growing companies encounter: a balance sheet she knew was wrong from day one.
"I walked into an entirely messy balance sheet," Sara explains. "The company had some interim CFOs who didn't do much, and bookkeepers who were doing their best but weren't given the tools or communication they needed."
The issues were systemic:
Copy.ai operated with two distinct business motions: a product-led growth model and an enterprise sales-led approach. Both ran through Stripe for checkout, but the data had never been properly separated or reconciled.
"With the volume of data we had, based on past experience, you simply can't get revenue recognition right without automating something," Sarah says.
Sara's first move was to try Stripe's native revenue recognition feature. She had experience with it from a previous role, so she knew what to expect—or thought she did.
She negotiated pricing, received promises of dedicated support, and turned on the feature. Then she waited. And waited.
"Nothing happened. Nothing was showing up on my Stripe dashboard."
Copy.ai processes roughly 39 million transactions in total, including freemium users. Sarah needed to publish financials and couldn't afford to wait indefinitely.
When data finally appeared weeks later, new problems emerged:
No bulk adjustments: When Sara asked about writing off thousands of failed transactions in bulk, Stripe's answer was clear: she'd need to do it manually, one by one.
Limited support: The promised support team didn't materialize. Instead, she was directed to a Discord channel to contact engineers directly.
Missing data: Stripe's invoice-based system couldn't see orphan payments—roughly $250K in revenue that would've been understated if Sarah hadn't caught it.
No drill-down capability: "Stripe has beautiful reporting and a beautiful dashboard, but you can't click in and drill down," Sara explains. "I spent six years in audit myself, and I've never met an auditor who would just take a revenue waterfall and say, 'Yeah, that's good.'"
The fundamental issue wasn't that Stripe is a bad tool. It's excellent for billing and payments. The problem was trying to use an operational tool to meet accounting requirements.
Frustrated and running out of time, Sara reached out to Cody Leach on HubiFi's product team. She'd worked with him before and knew he understood complex revenue scenarios.
"I said, 'I need help and I need help fast.' That was a pretty pivotal moment for me."
What happened next surprised even Sara, who's implemented revenue recognition systems multiple times throughout her career.
48 hours: That's how long it took HubiFi to sync and process the data—the most they'd ever synced in that timeframe.
Active problem-solving: Instead of just plugging in data and promising to "fix it all," the HubiFi team listened to Sarah's specific data issues:
Immediate usability: "We really didn't have very many adjustments that we had to make," Sarah recalls. In fact, she trusted the data enough to publish financials before completing full user acceptance testing—something she wouldn't normally do.
Throughout the implementation, one distinction became crystal clear: operational tools and accounting tools serve fundamentally different purposes.
"Stripe is an exceptional operational tool," Sara explains. "But those accounting requirements are just different."
Accounting requirements included:
Transaction lineage: The ability to trace every dollar from contract to invoice to payment to revenue recognition
Auditability: Drill-down capability to the invoice level, with detail that auditors can test and recalculate
Completeness checks: Built-in reconciliation to ensure nothing is missing—including edge cases like orphan payments
Accuracy verification: The ability to test any scenario and validate the logic before trusting the numbers
Policy customization: Flexibility to apply specific accounting policies around collectibility, prorations, disputes, and refunds
"You have to understand the relationships between contracts, invoices, payments, and disputes," Sara notes. "These are not the same objects or events in a business, and different relationships between them have different accounting implications."
With HubiFi in place, Sara's monthly close process transformed.
"Now I can close out the PLG revenue in hours, not days. Nobody's downloading a bunch of random reports and trying to do VLOOKUPs to figure out what amount got paid or didn't get paid."
More importantly, she achieved her primary goal: audit readiness without rework.
"I always go back to: I don't wanna rebook things. I wanna be audit ready. I can get down to the detail, I can get down to the invoice level, I can look up a specific invoice, I can run a report—I can do anything that I need to do to get to audit-level financials."
The restatement covered five years of data and millions of records. Within two weeks of implementation, Copy.ai had fully restated financials that would support the company through a successful acquisition.
Sara's experience offers clear guidance for other finance leaders navigating similar challenges:
1. Recognize when manual processes have reached their limit
"Maybe you can do it manually, but the accuracy is off. My numbers changed significantly when I automated revenue recognition versus another team trying to download different reports."
2. Understand the difference between operational and accounting tools
Both are necessary, but they serve different purposes. Don't expect your billing system to meet audit requirements.
3. Plan for audit readiness from day one
"I'm always thinking that I don't ever wanna do the work again. I'm not a fan of repeat work. I don't like to do the same thing over and over again."
4. High volume requires automation
With 400,000 transactions to process, manual methods aren't just inefficient—they're a liability.
5. Find partners who understand your specific challenges
"You guys really were able to listen to my data issues and understand the root of the problem versus just plugging it in and saying, 'We can fix it all for you.'"
Revenue restatements are common at high-growth companies. Infrastructure that works at $5 million in ARR rarely works at $50 million. Systems that handle 10,000 transactions monthly break down at 100,000.
The question isn't whether you'll need to restate revenue—it's whether you'll have the right infrastructure to do it quickly and accurately when the time comes.
For Copy.ai, the answer was clear. Within weeks of implementation, Sara had restated five years of financials, achieved audit readiness, and freed up her team to focus on strategic work instead of manual reconciliation.
"Once you do it right," Sara says, "you never have to do it again. That's the goal."
Ready to discuss your revenue recognition challenges? HubiFi helps high-growth companies automate complex revenue scenarios across multiple payment processors, billing systems, and revenue models. Schedule a demo to learn how we can help you achieve audit-ready financials without the manual work.
Accounting Automation | Product | Technical Accounting | Accounting Systems Nerd
A technology and automation focused CPA helping finance leaders bring their processes into the 21st century.If you're interested in talking finance systems - https://calendly.com/cody-hubifi Feel free to set up some time on my calendar. I like talking about this stuff too much
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