Client Overview

‍AllTrails is the world’s most popular and trusted platform for outdoor exploration. With more than 80 million members and more than 450,000 trails, the company supports inclusive access to nature for its global community. AllTrails is available at alltrails.com and through the Apple App Store and Google Play store.  The company uses multiple financial applications, and as it continued to grow, it needed better integration and more advanced capabilities. 

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The Problem

‍AllTrails was closing revenue manually in excel spreadsheets using only the standard reports from each revenue source. As a result, the team faced several challenges: 

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• Closing revenue was inherently subject to human error and required a significant amount of time to prepare and review.

• Ingesting financial data from 4 different sources in 4 different formats, each with unique data fields and identifiers, was cumbersome. 

• Preparing deferred revenue waterfalls was inefficient and time-consuming. 

• Limited ability to access subscriber level data and limited ability to link sales data to cash receipt data for Apple App Store data.

• Inability to efficiently accurately present Apple App Store revenue and fees due to lack of visibility in Apple’s reporting of international indirect taxes. 

• Inability to assess in-month performance against internal data sources, which led to discrepancies between where they thought they were going to land at month-end vs where they actually landed. 

They needed solutions to these problems and a partner to help them scale.  

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The Solution

AllTrails began their search for a revenue recognition service provider in 2023 and tried several implementations with smaller startups in the space in an effort to keep costs down. After several poor experiences, the team was skeptical that they would ever find a solution to meet their needs. But in 2024, the team renewed its focus, motivated by a need for more granular reporting that would have required a significant amount of additional manual effort in Excel without a new service provider. 

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The team quickly began due diligence, this time focusing on key players in the space. They evaluated a few options meeting the criteria including HubiFi, as well as others such as Leapfin. After much discussion and careful consideration, they chose to partner with HubiFi for the following reasons:

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• Risk-Free Proof of Concept: This allowed the Team the ability to see the product in action to better understand the capabilities and UI first hand before committing to the purchase. Since HubiFi isn’t a rules engine, they were able to demonstrate the product capabilities much more quickly & accurately than their competitor.

• Next Level Apple Integration: Hubifi figured out a way to visualize subscriber-level data for Apple, to calculate international indirect taxes for more accurate reporting, and a way to link sales transactions to payment transactions.

• Accounting Expertise : HubiFi’s implementation leads were both accountants, not engineers. This made a world of difference when discussing configuration setup and streamlining implementation, as all parties were speaking the same terminology.  

• Data Validation & Fast Delivery: With an aggressive timeline, the Hubifi Team rolled up their sleeves and dove into data validation, creating transaction level data reconciliations for several months and setting up validation templates that the AllTrails team could easily replicate for additional periods. This saved time for AllTrails and allowed them to implement the product with existing, limited resources. AllTrails was in a position to start recognizing revenue using Hubifi within 2 months from the proof of concept. 

• Integration Mastery: HubiFi’s knowledge of the integrations for AllTrails’ tech stack was unmatched.  The Hubifi Team handled all of the integration work and their turnkey integrations and rapid system onboarding ensured the AllTrails Team could focus on validating the numbers being produced by Hubifi vs getting bogged down with integration and/or configuration issues.

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The Outcome

‍AllTrails fully automated their order-to-cash cycle, including automation of fee amortization under ASC 340, across Apple, Google, and other applications, enabling daily financial closes and revenue reporting. This resulted in:

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• Labor Cost Efficiency - Avoided hiring headcount to perform additional manual work and improved efficiency of existing staff.

• Risk Reduction (Audit, ASC 606 Compliance & Financial Accuracy) - Transitioned to a subscriber-level revenue recognition framework in accordance with ASC 606, rather than relying on opaque Apple reports, and established automated controls with full auditability down to the contract level.

• Improved Accuracy - Enhanced reporting of international indirect taxes for Apple improved the accuracy of AllTrails’ presentation of sales and fees.

• Financial Visibility - Gained daily visibility into daily accounting information as well as the ability to slice the data in various ways to support business decisions, detect potential anomalies and find new opportunities for improvement.

• Scalability & Business Continuity - Set a foundation for their finance function that would scale with the organization without adding additional headcount.