AIMS360 is the leading provider of business ERP software for fashion brands. Some of their customers are major brands, like Nike Golf and Mark Cuban’s Gameday Couture, but most of the more than 500 businesses they serve are small- to- medium-sized operations led by fashion entrepreneurs. Their software helps these talented designers get paid and grow, handling everything from customer management to inventory management to order processing to accounts receivable. AIMS360 platform processed over one billion dollars in orders last year.

For many years, AIMS360 sold their software via a payment plan that functioned as a rent to buy agreement. This business model, based on regular monthly payments, seemed like a natural fit for subscriptions, so the company decided to stop selling software licenses and move to a subscription model to build stronger customer relationships and grow recurring revenue streams. But the transition was more challenging than they anticipated.

“When it came to subscriptions, our accounting system was pretty much nonsense,” explains Shahin Kohan, President of AIMS360. “We couldn’t track renewals or churn, or manage incentives. The system could tell us how much money we were collecting, but it couldn’t show us what our subscription business looked like in the past or the future.”

The company needed a system that was purpose-built to handle the complexity and constant change of a subscription business model. So AIMS360 brought in Zuora.

Right away, Zuora gave AIMS360 much more precise control over their software pricing and packaging. They could change their prices and offer new subscriptions and packages whenever it made sense to do so to help subscribers to grow into new offerings.

And renewals became easy. The customer chooses their plan and AIMS360 generates a quote that turns into an order with triggered downstream provisioning processes. It’s all automated in the Zuora platform.

Perhaps best of all, AIMS360 now has full visibility into how the company is performing. “We make all our decisions based on the impact analysis provided by Zoura,” says Kohan. “New customers, expansions, contraction and churn—those four metrics tell us what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong so we can fix it.”

At first, AIMS360 experimented with lots of different subscription offerings, but it created confusion among customers. Using the metrics and advice provided by Zuora, they were able to consolidate their offerings into four distinct plans based on the size of the customer’s business. The simplicity has helped AIMS360 build better relationships with their customers.

“With subscriptions, the customer relationship keeps happening,” says Kohan. “The monetization process is different, because you’re basically getting little chunks of money on the subscription over and over again. Zuora has really made the subscription model work for us.