In a logical extension of its cloud-pleasing subscription billing system, Zuora, the start-up near Oracle where Marc Benioff has parked some of his money, is going after the next big thing, which for it is the finance department, keeper of the corporate treasury.
This week it launched Z-Finance, trumpeted as the world’s first finance application built for the subscription economy.
According to Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo, the double-entry bookkeeping, invented by Venetian merchants in the 15th century, memorialized in the Ur-textbook written by the Franciscan friar Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli in 1495 and, as a result, practiced by every modern finance department today, doesn’t accommodate subscriptions.
So Zuora has invented a framework to capture the dynamic, ongoing revenue that’s the foundation of the subscription business model.