One number for revenue, across 2 products & 3 systems
Objective
Give Digital Science a single, trustworthy daily revenue and subscriptions model across both products, built on infrastructure sound enough to support every phase after it.
Obstacle
Revenue was split across three systems, a recent Stripe migration had broken existing subscription models, and there was no reconciled way to confirm what finance already reported by hand.
Outcome
A unified daily subscriptions and revenue model reconciled to within roughly 1% of finance’s own figures, delivered on a Dataform pipeline upgraded to support every phase that came after it.
Background
Digital Science is a research technology company that builds tools used across the academic and scientific research lifecycle, including Overleaf, the widely used collaborative LaTeX editor, and Writefull, an AI writing assistant for academic authors. Revenue for these products flowed through Stripe, Recurly and NetSuite, with finance tracking monthly figures by hand, and no single automated model that the data team, finance and leadership could all rely on together.
Challenges
A Broken Update Left The Numbers Wrong: A recent migration to Stripe had left some subscription records incorrect, cancelled subscriptions showing as active, migrated ones not properly reflected, which broke reports that depended on that data. On top of that, two separate products needed to be combined into one clear picture without either one’s numbers accidentally bleeding into the other’s.
The Numbers Had to Match Finance’s Source of Truth: Revenue flowed through three different systems, while finance had been manually reconciling the true monthly figures. An automated number that merely looked plausible was not enough, it had to reproduce the number finance already trusted and clearly account for any remaining variance.
Solution
Fixing The Foundations: Before starting anything new, we corrected the subscription records that had gone wrong, so cancelled and migrated subscriptions showed up correctly again, and brought both products together into one clear, unified view. We also put stronger checks in place behind the scenes: automatic quality tests, testing every change against real data before it went live, and keeping different people’s work properly separated. That meant the whole system could be trusted and safely built on afterwards.
Working With Finance: Anyone can build a revenue dashboard from a warehouse. The harder, more valuable work is making sure that number matches what finance already believes, line by line, across three different systems. We sat with Digital Science’s finance team until the gap closed to roughly 1%, which is the difference between a dashboard people glance at and a number the whole business actually runs on.
Impact
Discrepancies Surfaced: NetSuite and Recurly could each report their own piece of the picture, but neither could explain the gap between them. Working through the reconciliation, we traced specific discrepancies back to a sync issue between Recurly and Stripe that had been silently distorting a month’s figures. No off-the-shelf accounting tool could have surfaced that; it took someone tracing the data itself, line by line, across systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
One Business, Not Two Disconnected Products: Overleaf and Writefull had never sat in the same model before. For the first time, their revenue and subscriptions are comparable side by side, reconciled to within roughly 1% of finance’s own figures, giving Digital Science one number the whole business can stand behind instead of two that almost match.
Built Once, Used by Every Phase Since: This was not a one-off dashboard. Every phase that followed; from funnel analytics and customer behaviour to CRM attribution, was built directly on this foundation, without having to rebuild the underlying infrastructure. That reuse is the clearest test of whether the foundation was built right the first time.
Creating Value For Digital Science...
3 finance systems reconciled,
~1% variance against finance's own figures,
& finance across multiple countries in one place for the first time.
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