// CASE STUDY
5 MIN READ FINANCE OPERATIONS
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How SpotHopper got $384K a year back with ORiON
SpotHopper's finance team cut new-customer setup from about 10 minutes to under 25 seconds. That returns roughly 160 hours a month and lets them grow toward 1,000+ new customers a month without adding a single hire.
of team time back every year
160 HRS × $200/HR × 12
per customer setup
DOWN FROM ~10 MINUTES
returned to the team every month
ABOUT ONE FULL-TIME ROLE
added to keep up with growth
AS SETUPS HEAD TOWARD 1,300/MO
SpotHopper, restaurant technology (SaaS)
About 900 new customer contracts a month, heading past 1,000 in 2027
HubSpot, NetSuite, Stripe and SpotHopper's own customer platform
Both workflows live within about a month
160 hours a month of re-typing
Every new customer was set up by hand, one system at a time. When a deal closed, the Deal Desk checked the contract and keyed it into HubSpot. The billing team then rebuilt the customer, the billing account and the subscription in NetSuite, and entered the same details into Stripe and SpotHopper's own platform.
There was no real integration between the systems. The people were the integration.
per customer. 6 to 7 for experienced staff, 15 to 25 for newer staff.
a month across roughly 1,000 setups and contract changes.
to trace and fix each error in an address, billing detail or date.
from closed deal to billable customer, and weeks for an unusual contract.
Volume kept climbing toward 1,000 new customers a month, with 1,300 in view. In past years SpotHopper had added six to eight hires a year to keep pace. This time leadership set a firm rule: no new headcount.
We were tasked with finding those solutions and implementing them without increasing headcount by even one.
FINANCIAL OPERATIONS MANAGER, SPOTHOPPER
3 tools before ORiON
Each one solved part of the problem and created a new one.
Requests went to engineers, back for testing, then back to engineers again.
The team builds and changes workflows themselves, in days instead of months.
Accurate, but every field was mapped by hand, and one mismatch broke the whole flow.
Says exactly what didn't map and suggests the fix.
Needed hand-holding and exact wording to get anything right.
Shapes the instructions so the work comes out right without retries.
2 workflows, 2 approvals, 0 re-typing
SpotHopper's FP&A Manager, who owns automation across the finance department, built two ORiON workflows that take a billing-ready deal from HubSpot to a finished NetSuite customer and billing account. Nothing is written to NetSuite until a person approves it.
About 10 minutes per customer, by hand
- 1Deal Desk keys the contract into HubSpot
- 2Billing re-keys the customer into NetSuite
- 3Then the billing account and subscription
- 4Then Stripe and SpotHopper's platform
Under 25 seconds per customer, two approvals
- 1Deal is marked billing-ready in HubSpot
- 2ORiON builds the customer, skipping duplicates
- ✓Team approves
- 3ORiON builds the matching billing account
- ✓Team approves, and billing is notified
The entire workflow from start to finish takes approximately six minutes. Most of the time it's just counting a timer, waiting for me to click approve.
FP&A MANAGER, SPOTHOPPER
Security, pricing and a team they can reach
It works with one person's access, not blanket access
ORiON runs through the FP&A Manager's own login and the permissions SpotHopper already gives him. Company data stays inside those permissions and is not used to train AI. For a security team that had turned down earlier AI projects, that settled it.
Pricing that doesn't climb with volume
Other tools priced by seat or by volume, so ten times the work would have cost ten times as much, and leadership would not have approved it. ORiON is priced per organization, not per seat, so the team could automate as much as they wanted.
A team on the other end of the line
SpotHopper works directly with the people who build ORiON, who fixed issues as they came up and kept improving the product along the way.
$384K a year back, 0 new hires
ORiON gives SpotHopper about 160 hours a month back, the work of a full-time role, and lets the same team absorb years of growth.
160 hrs/month × $200/hr × 12 = $384,000 a year
SpotHopper values its team's time at close to $200 an hour fully loaded. Counted another way, its own conservative estimate of the hiring it no longer needs is $150,000 to $200,000 a year.
The headcount will be static while customer growth continues to increase. Everyone still gets to eat dinner, go to bed and have a family, and not have to work 80 hours a week to keep up.
FINANCIAL OPERATIONS MANAGER, SPOTHOPPER
Years of problems, solved in days
"It's solving problems that we've worked on for years in a few days.
"Using my login, using the access they've allowed me to have, and knowing that the data is not going out into the ether, I'm confident that our data is safe."
"ORiON is managing to keep the humanity in AI a little more than the other tools we investigated. You don't want to just set it and forget it when it's your business."
"There's no way I would have made the headway I've made in the month since we engaged ORiON with Claude on its own. I would still be in the beginning stages of customer creation."
"This tool allows people like us to catch up to the present. You're never behind. You can catch up if you have this tool."
"Meeting the actual people behind the product has been such a valuable part of this. To have access to real help is a huge game changer."
"It's a no-brainer. If you're doing a lot of processes manually that you know can be automated, but you have concerns about AI, ORiON is the way to go."
12 hourly runs a day, then beyond billing
SpotHopper is moving from twice-daily runs to near-real-time setup, then taking ORiON across finance. The team expects the roadmap to make most of the functions they oversee at least 75% more efficient.
Both workflows run hourly through the Deal Desk's 12-hour day. A contract approved this hour is a customer and a billing account by the next.
The next workflow builds the NetSuite subscription itself, the last manual step in setup.
Upgrades, downgrades and ownership changes, the rest of the team's 1,000 monthly activities.
HR, accounts payable, purchasing and the monthly close, planned for early 2027.
I like ORiON so much that I want it to touch everywhere.
FP&A MANAGER, SPOTHOPPER
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