Challenge

Brothers Julius and Lawrence Holmefjord-Sarabi launched Aureus Academy in 2013 with a different approach to music education: rather than follow the rigid instruction methods offered at most music schools, Aureus would let students learn what they want using an immersive and individualized approach. Aureus’s model has been a success, and the company has met rising student demand by steadily opening new music centers across Singapore.

To support that growth, Aureus realized that it needed to transition away from cash payments—which are commonly used for educational services in Singapore—to a credit-card-based system that would allow the company to spend less time managing payments and more time pursuing its mission of serving students. Aureus also planned to switch its subscription model to charge a card on file at the beginning of each month rather than manually collecting payments from each student.

In 2016, Aureus began implementing those changes with a payment provider that offered basic invoicing and credit card processing capabilities, but that provider’s limited services still left Aureus with a lot of work. For instance, its finance staff had to manually reconcile transactions and invoices, a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.

It became clear that Aureus needed a new payment partner with the capabilities, infrastructure, and flexibility to support the company’s evolving model. In addition to further simplifying and automating the billing, payment, and reconciliation process, Aureus wanted more flexibility to experiment with pricing models to attract and retain students. Another key need was better payment data and reporting capabilities to give the growing company more visibility into its own finances.

Most importantly, Aureus wanted to reduce the time its team devoted to managing payments and billing. “I wanted our tech team to focus more on building our product rather than building an infrastructure-related product like a payments system,” said Julius Holmefjord-Sarabi, the company’s cofounder, chief technology officer, and chief financial officer.

Solution

Aureus decided to replace its original payment provider with Stripe in 2018, gradually adding products from Stripe’s Revenue suite to help automate the company’s entire revenue lifecycle—from pricing and billing to payment collection, reconciliation, and reporting. Additionally, Aureus also started to revaluate its corporate structure across 26 teaching centers and how to efficiently manage fund flows to each music center using Stripe Connect.

The company first implemented Stripe Payments to process credit card transactions, which allowed the company to process them from a central payment hub, rather than by staff at each location. Later, Aureus adopted Stripe Billing to replace its in-house billing system, giving the company more flexibility to offer specialized lesson packages and promotions, such as options to prepay for a year of lessons at a discounted rate.

Aureus also used Connect to enable each of its centers to invoice its own students and to have those payments collected through Billing. That helped streamline the invoicing process, and made it easier to standardize when subscribers are invoiced and charged for their lessons. Instead of having receivables spread throughout the month, Aureus was able to push the majority of those invoices to the beginning of each month. In addition to improving cash flow, that also kept Aureus’s finance team from having to manage accounts receivable or deal with issues such as invoice ageing.

Adoption of Stripe Revenue Recognition helped the company simplify and automate its accounting and reconciliation process, giving Aureus more insights into each location’s real-time revenues and financial performance. To further enhance financial visibility, Aureus also implemented Stripe Sigma to develop custom reports that could inform data-driven decisions.

Through this multiyear engagement, Aureus worked closely with Stripe professional services to implement new products. For instance, Stripe’s professional services team provided added guidance and expertise through the Billing implementation, helping Aureus align requirements to product features and working through special use cases. The team worked closely with Aureus to prepare and plan the migration process, guiding the initial Billing rollout to several centers. This approach helped minimize risk and enabled Aureus to move forward with more than 25 other locations over six months, ensuring that each location was running smoothly before moving on to the next location.

Aureus’s deep integration with Stripe has more recently supported a corporate restructuring that separated the majority of centers into independent subsidiaries of the parent company. The Connect integration helped Aureus create a streamlined, automated platform that allows each center to seamlessly receive payments from the Aureus parent company. Aureus worked with Stripe’s professional services team to explain the corporate structure and devise an integration plan.

“The team was helpful in getting the first two or three locations set up and understanding how to control and configure Connect,” said Julius. “Then it was just a matter of doing the same process 20-plus times.”

Results

Payments reduces time spent managing invoices by 90%

By integrating Payments, Aureus was able to minimize the amount of manual work its finance team needed to do to reconcile payments with invoices. “Managing this process used to be a nightmare,” said Julius. “After migrating over to Stripe Payments, we had complete clarity.”

Approximately 30% of developer time saved by Billing integration

The migration to Billing substantially reduced the time Aureus’s developers used to spend maintaining its in-house billing system. “Instead, they spent time building enhanced features for our learning app, which we’re able to roll out this year because we’re not dealing with changes around a billing product,” said Julius.

95% of invoices are now paid at the beginning of each month

Billing and Connect helped streamline and standardize the invoicing process. Instead of invoices being sent and paid throughout the month, Aureus now is able to collect the bulk of its subscription revenues within the first few days of each month.

Stripe paves the way for international expansion

Within the next five years, Aureus expects to be operating centers in international markets such as Korea, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and the US. With Stripe's financial infrastructure, Aureus Academy has been able to launch new locations 50% faster, significantly accelerating its expansion timeline. Julius expects Stripe to play a key role in those expansion plans, including accepting multiple currencies and payment methods easily with Billing, to seamlessly integrating new business entities with Connect. “We wouldn’t be able to do it without Stripe,” he said.