Adaptive Security Grew Its Customer Base 5x and Cut DSO by 35% with Tabs
About Adaptive Security
Adaptive Security helps organizations prepare for modern security threats through awareness training built for today’s evolving risk landscape. Its platform brings together phishing simulations, email security, and AI governance to help companies protect against deepfakes and other forms of human risk. As the company’s customer base grew rapidly, its small accounting team needed a way to keep billing operations efficient without adding headcount at the same pace.
The Challenge: Manual Invoicing Couldn’t Keep Pace with Customer Growth
At a glance, these were the biggest challenges:
- Customer growth was rapidly increasing the billing workload. More customers meant more contracts to review and more invoices to set up each month.
- Invoice volume was scaling just as quickly. Monthly invoicing increased from roughly 50–60 invoices around implementation to about 240.
- The accounting team had limited capacity. Just two full-time employees needed to support a customer base more than five times larger.
- Collections lacked automation. Without automated reminders, follow-up on outstanding receivables depended entirely on manual effort.
Before Tabs, Adaptive Security managed billing through QuickBooks Online. At the time, the accounting function was especially lean, with one internal employee supported by outsourced CPAs. Invoicing required significant manual work. Each customer contract had to be reviewed closely so the team could translate its terms into accurate invoices and set up billing correctly.
“Pre-Tabs, one of the biggest pain points was how time-consuming invoice setup was. There’s a lot of detail in a contract that you have to parse through to be able to create an accurate invoice, which Tabs addresses with AI contract ingestion.”
— Katie Buttarazzi, Senior Accountant, Adaptive Security
As Adaptive Security grew, the company expanded its internal accounting team to two full-time employees. Even with that added capacity, the existing workflow became harder to sustain. Each new customer added to the workload, putting increasing pressure on a still-small accounting team, and the manual process was quickly becoming a bottleneck for the business.
Why Tabs: Automating Invoicing Without Adding Operational Drag
As Adaptive Security evaluated billing platforms, its external accountants recommended Maxio. The company completed a demo, but the annual contract was more than it wanted to commit to. Adaptive Security ultimately felt Tabs could provide the functionality it needed at a lower cost.
“Tabs integrated with everything we needed, was very competitively priced, and solved our biggest pain points around ingesting contracts and automatically setting up invoices.”
— Katie Buttarazzi, Senior Accountant, Adaptive Security
A major factor was Tabs’ ability to read customer contracts and automatically create invoices from them. The platform also integrated with Adaptive Security’s existing systems, giving the team a way to automate its core invoicing workflow while continuing to run accounting operations efficiently.
Automated contract ingestion and invoice generation
Tabs changed the accounting team’s role in invoicing. Instead of manually setting up each invoice from contract terms, the team can rely on Tabs to ingest the contract and create the invoice. Their work is focused primarily on reviewing the output for accuracy before sending.
That automation became increasingly important as invoice volume climbed. Adaptive Security went from sending roughly 50 to 60 invoices per month around the time Tabs was implemented to approximately 240 today.
“Invoicing has grown exponentially, and that would not have been possible if we were still using QBO and manually processing all these contracts ourselves.”
— Katie Buttarazzi, Senior Accountant, Adaptive Security
Automated dunning for a more consistent collections process
As Adaptive Security matured its collections process, Tabs’ automated invoice reminders became an important part of the workflow. The team configured reminders around invoice due dates and past-due balances, then paired those automated messages with manual outreach when necessary.
“We’ve seen a significant improvement in collections after using Tabs for automated reminders.”
— Katie Buttarazzi, Senior Accountant, Adaptive Security
The result was a more systematic way to follow up on outstanding receivables. Adaptive Security’s DSO decreased by roughly 35% with the help of Tabs’ dunning schedule.
Life With Tabs: Supporting More Than 5x Growth with a Two-Person Accounting Team
Adaptive Security’s partnership with Tabs came at a critical point in the company’s growth. What started as a way to automate a highly manual invoicing process has become infrastructure the accounting team can rely on as the business scales.
- 5.6x customer growth since implementing Tabs.
- Roughly 4x monthly invoice volume, increasing from 50–60 invoices to around 240.
- 35% lower DSO, with help from automated dunning.
- Two full-time accounting employees supporting a much larger customer base without finance headcount growing at the same rate.
For the accounting team, that means growth no longer creates the same amount of incremental billing work. Tabs handles much of the setup that once happened manually, so the team can focus on reviewing invoices, managing exceptions, and keeping collections moving. That operational leverage has allowed Adaptive Security to support a much larger business without rebuilding its finance function around the increased volume.
“For other finance teams scaling quickly, I would emphasize the ability to be hands-off using Tabs. Invoicing becomes less of a manual process and more about completing checks before hitting send, which is really nice when you’re sending 240-plus invoices a month.”
— Katie Buttarazzi, Senior Accountant, Adaptive Security
