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The promise of modern payment platforms is simple: handle transactions seamlessly while giving you the data you need. But for high-growth companies processing hundreds of thousands of monthly transactions, that promise often falls apart when it's time to close the books.
Two finance leaders - Sara Honeycutt at Copy.ai and Scott Wernery at eero (an Amazon company) recently shared how they confronted this exact problem at their companies—and why solving it became critical to their team's ability to function strategically rather than reactively.
When Sara Honeycutt joined Copy.ai as the Head of Finance, she walked into a situation many controllers know too well. Previous CFOs had left minimal infrastructure. Bookkeepers had done their best with what they had, downloading native Stripe reports and manually calculating revenue recognition. The result? A balance sheet Sara knew was wrong the moment she saw it.
The scope of the problem:
"I knew that with the volume of data, based on past experience, you simply can't get revenue recognition right without automating something," Sara explained.
Sara's first instinct was to turn on Stripe's native revenue recognition feature. She negotiated pricing and was told support would be available. Then she waited. And waited. When data finally appeared on her dashboard days later, she discovered the reality:
What went wrong with Stripe:
"I found that we had a mess of data," Sara said. "We'd never written off failed transactions. Everything was commingled."
More critically, Stripe's reporting couldn't provide the audit-level detail Sara needed. "You can't click in and drill down," she noted. "I've never met an auditor who would just take a revenue waterfall and an entry and say, 'Yeah, that's good.' They need details of invoices. They'll make a selection and recalculate your revenue and deferred revenue."
When Sara finally found a solution, HubiFi, that could process her data properly, it synced 400,000 transactions in 48 hours. More importantly, it uncovered $250,000 in revenue from orphan payments—payments that existed in Stripe but weren't attached to invoices, meaning they would never have been recognized using Stripe's tools alone.
Scott Wernery joined eero, an Amazon subsidiary, after three years at Prime Video. His mandate was clear: accelerate the monthly close process for a business that had exploded in growth over the prior 24 to 36 months.
"The team was in a very reactive state, just from lack of resources," Scott explained. "When the business grows, accounting usually picks up a lot of that manual churn and that lift. We don't want to block the business, so we're willing to accept it."
Eero's revenue complexity:
Scott's approach was pragmatic: identify the easiest areas to automate quickly, remove them from the team's plate, and redirect energy toward actually reviewing financials and closing books accurately.
The decision to look at third-party solutions rather than building internally wasn't obvious in an Amazon environment known for building its own tools. But Scott recognized a critical limitation: "If they ended up building an internal tool, it probably would've met 50 to maybe 75% of what we want. But we want 100 percent."
Internal tools at Amazon are built to serve multiple teams and use cases, which extends timelines and often results in compromises. The team needed something immediately that understood the nuances of their specific revenue model—including how to handle disputes across multiple payment processors and reconcile subscription revenue with one-time hardware sales.
The impact was immediate and measurable:
What changed for Scott's team:
"None of us want to be copying and pasting reports and rummaging through thousands of Excel rows to tie out one report to another," Scott said.
Revenue accounting for high-volume businesses isn't just about closing books faster, though that matters. It's about risk reduction and team elevation.
The real costs of manual revenue processes:
Both Sara and Scott emphasized the same point: automation done right doesn't replace judgment—it enables it. When you trust your foundational numbers because you can prove they're complete and accurate, you can finally focus on what those numbers mean rather than whether they're correct.
That shift from transaction processor to business partner is what makes continuous close worth pursuing. Not because it saves hours—though it does—but because it transforms what your team can contribute to the business.
Learn how you can automate order-to-cash accounting for usage-based billing or non-annual subscriptions with Stripe, Recurly, Ayden, PayPal, or Apple App Store.
How to get a daily or continuous close and how other innovators are breaking the monthly close paradigm.
Taste and learn about six international, award-winning wines (ranging from crisp whites to velvety reds), hand selected by winemaker, Matt Smith.
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An accomplished two-time entrepreneur, polyglot in finance, data & tech with 15 years of expertise. Builder, practitioner, leader—pioneering multiple ERP implementations and data solutions.
Catalyst behind a 6% gross margin improvement with a sub-90-day IPO at Root insurance, powered by his vision & platform. Having held virtually every role from accountant to finance systems to finance exec, he brings a rare and noteworthy perspective in rethinking the finance tooling landscape.
Jonathan Ashton is a seasoned finance and accounting professional, currently serving as Revenue Accounting Manager at Healthie, an all-in-one practice management platform and EHR provider. In this role, he oversees the full revenue recognition lifecycle—configuring subledger policies, ensuring ASC 606 compliance, and automating the reconciliation of high-volume Stripe transactions into the general ledger.
Jon earned his bachelor’s degree in accounting from Drexel University.
Sarah Honeycutt has over 20 years of experience in accounting and finance. She is a seasoned professional who leds the accounting function at 6sense, a rapidly growing SaaS company.
As Vice President of Accounting, she oversaw the full cycle of accounting and financial reporting—ensuring compliance, accuracy, and timeliness—while also providing strategic guidance grounded in deep analytical expertise and industry knowledge.
Peggy Wang is the Head of Finance at Vitally, where she leads the finance organization in building comprehensive dashboards and reporting frameworks that bring real-time visibility to key metrics—including Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Gross & Net Revenue Retention, and Churn & Risk—empowering cross-functional teams to make data-driven decision.
Peggy holds a degree from the University of Texas at Austin’s Red McCombs School of Business, and has cultivated a deep expertise in financial forecasting, planning, and analytics.
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