Challenge

Shipt was founded in Alabama in 2014 as a local company that connected customers to grocery delivery. It has since expanded to 5,000 cities covering 60 million households. Early on, Stripe helped Shipt scale on a single payments provider. As the company’s growth accelerated, it needed to streamline its back-office operations to easily leverage financial data and drive better decision-making; accelerate accounting, billing, and financial reporting processes; and keep customers and its gig-economy shoppers happy.

“When I joined Shipt, accounting for subscription revenue took eight hours for one individual,” explained Courtney Myers, VP, Financial Controller at Shipt. “We wanted to streamline our close timeline to enable our team to support other key initiatives.”

The company’s rapid scaling created an urgency to eliminate accounting friction caused by manual processes and disconnected data. Shipt needed a comprehensive solution to streamline and automate revenue and finance processes—from billing, to data analysis, to payments.

Solution

Shipt used Stripe Billing to automate revenue management workflows. With Smart Retries automatically retrying failed payments, Shipt was also able to reduce involuntary churn across its subscription members. And to tie its revenue operations together, Shipt used Stripe Revenue Recognition to close the books quickly and accurately, and it also used Stripe Data Pipeline to send up-to-date Stripe data and reports to Snowflake in a few clicks.

“We had options to do this in-house, but it made a lot of sense to engage Stripe to help,” said Myers. “With Data Pipeline, we could leverage an out-of-the-box solution, implement it quickly, and move faster.”

With its revenue data in a single solution, Shipt could run account reconciliations much faster using automated reconciliation between the general ledger and source system.

Results

Stripe made revenue and finance automation a reality for Shipt, saving time and increasing visibility—even as the company continues to scale and comply with increasing demands for accurate and timely financial reports and insights.

Faster access to revenue insights with Stripe Data Pipeline

Shipt now centralizes Stripe data along with other key financial and operational data to close the books faster and unlock richer business insights on revenue, customer acquisition, retention, and more.

Myers said, “As we got more real-time insights, we learned there were some unique timing challenges with our revenue recognition. This was possible because Data Pipeline seamlessly enabled us to bring the critical data together in Snowflake.

88% reduction in revenue recognition cycle times leaves more time for value-add work

Stripe now gives Shipt revenue management automation and centralized data to close the books faster and gain access to real-time financial insights. Decision-makers can then quickly understand the numbers and act with confidence.

“What used to take us eight hours from gathering the data, putting it together in a complex model with multiple data sources, and reconciliation throughout, we moved to less than an hour,” said Myers. “We can pull a report, book our entry, do the analysis, and understand the results quickly.”

Improved experiences for customers, shoppers, and internal teams

Shipt used a wide range of Stripe solutions to create an intuitive and enjoyable experience, providing reliability for customers and pushing payments quickly to shoppers. “We want to make sure that we have a frictionless experience at checkout,” Myers said. “Stripe has enabled that through its payment processing functions, and our payment acceptance rate is 97%.”

Stripe has also helped Shipt deliver a better experience for its shoppers through quicker access to funds. “Investing in shoppers who work on the Shipt platform is a priority for us. One of our most important features we leverage is the instant payout feature,” Myers said. “App-based workers prefer access to pay on-demand instead of that traditional weekly cycle.”

Stripe has also enhanced the experience for Shipt’s internal teams as it streamlines back-office operations and provides real-time access to key revenue and finance data.