How Archive Cut Finance Admin from 6 Hours a Week to Under 1
Archive's Head of Finance and Revenue replaced manual Stripe reconciliation, subscription configuration, and cash flow forecasting with Ari — and eliminated the need to backfill a finance associate.
152%
Increase in collections
200%
Growth in cash collected
5x
Reduction in admin hours
9 days
DSO reduction
“Every Monday I had to wake up at 5 AM and reconcile for three or four hours before meetings started because our churn data was all wrong, our new ARR and expansion revenue was all wrong.”
Ethan Maenza, Head of Finance and Revenue, Archive
The Challenge
15 people in Stripe, zero source of truth
Archive is an AI-powered creator marketing platform that helps e-commerce brands detect, track, and manage influencer content across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. As the company scaled its enterprise sales motion, the billing process became a serious bottleneck.
When a deal closed, the account executive or CSM was responsible for manually configuring the subscription in Stripe: setting up products, prices, discounts, billing emails, and payment terms. 15 people on the go-to-market team were touching Stripe directly — every AE and every CSM.
The result was predictable. Subscriptions stacked on top of each other. Custom contracts led to edge cases no SOP could cover. Revenue data in their recognition platform, SaaS Grid, was routinely wrong.
Ethan, Archive's sole finance hire, spent four to six hours every week on cleanup and reconciliation alone. New AEs took up to an hour to configure a single subscription correctly. Experienced reps still needed 10 minutes per deal. And despite searching for a platform that could automate the HubSpot-to-Stripe handoff with Archive's custom fields and pricing, nothing on the market could handle it.
The choice was build it themselves or live with the pain. They chose the pain.
“We searched for a SaaS platform that could automate the subscription creation process from HubSpot into Stripe. There were no solutions on the market that could handle our custom properties. Ari was able to solve that.”
Ethan Maenza, Head of Finance and Revenue, Archive
The Solution
An AI teammate that understood the whole stack
Archive initially signed up for LedgerUp to get visibility into overdue invoices and automate collection campaigns. They didn't even know about Ari, LedgerUp's AI agent that operates directly inside Slack and can manage the entire HubSpot-to-Stripe workflow.
Once Ethan started working with Ari, the first breakthrough was subscription automation. Rather than having reps log into Stripe and guess their way through custom configurations, an AE could tag Ari in Slack after closing a deal. Ari would pull the deal data from HubSpot, check for matching customer records using Archive's custom shop ID field, and configure the subscription correctly in Stripe — including products, prices, discounts, and custom properties.
But the impact went far beyond subscription setup. Ethan described three layers of value:
Subscription configuration
AEs stopped touching Stripe entirely. Guardrails were defined once, and Ari operated within them. Misconfigurations dropped to zero.
Cash flow forecasting
Ethan had spent 20+ hours trying to build a cash flow model from Stripe's data. It was wrong. Ari generated an accurate cash flow view from Stripe that plugged directly into Archive's operating model, giving the team confident 12- to 24-month forecasting for the first time.
General admin and cleanup
The Monday morning reconciliation marathons became simple. Ethan could delegate the detective work to Ari: voiding stale invoices, tracing discrepancies, cleaning up subscription records.
Weekly admin time
4-6 hours → < 1 hour
Cash flow model
20+ hrs (wrong) → Accurate
Setup was frictionless. Ethan described the onboarding experience bluntly:
“Add it to Slack, and then he was there and doing things. Time to value was almost immediate.”
Ethan Maenza, Head of Finance and Revenue, Archive
The Results
Better data, faster cash, one fewer headcount
Within weeks, the impact was measurable across the board. Collections increased 152%. Cash collected from December through the end of February grew 200%. Days sales outstanding dropped by 9 days. And the Monday morning fire drills that defined Ethan's week were over.
But the most telling result was a hiring decision. Archive had a finance associate on the team whose role was to offload administrative billing and reconciliation work from Ethan. When that person left, Ethan expected to need a replacement.
“After that person left, I thought I was going to need to replace him. Ari has made it so that we don't really have any plans to replace that person.”
Ethan Maenza, Head of Finance and Revenue, Archive
Today, 14 people across Archive's sales, customer success, and finance teams use Ari. Salespeople get to spend more time selling. CSMs get to spend more time with customers. And Ethan gets to focus on building a new business unit instead of reconciling Stripe at 5 AM.
When asked if Ari had ever made a mistake, Ethan was direct:
“I cannot recall a mistake that Ari made that was not a result of a poor prompt.”
Ethan Maenza, Head of Finance and Revenue, Archive
Because Ari presents a plan before executing, and users approve before anything is submitted, errors from ambiguity get caught before they become problems.
When asked what would happen if Ari were turned off tomorrow, the answer was immediate — he'd need to hire again and pull himself off the initiatives that actually move the business forward:
“I would need to deprioritize some of the more important initiatives I'm working on at the company in order to dedicate that six-plus hours a week back to the administrative finance side of the business.”
Ethan Maenza, Head of Finance and Revenue, Archive
Company
Archive.com
Industry
E-commerce / Creator Marketing
Stack
HubSpot, Stripe, SaaS Grid
Team using Ari
14 people across Sales, CS, Finance
Software should do the work.
You should move the business.
See how Ari takes billing ops off your team's shoulders - from contract to collected cash.