Skillshare Saves Time & Scales Financial Operations with Tipalti

HQ New York City, NY
Customer Since 2018
Industry Online Services

“We used to spend three hours a week making payments. Now, it’s down to minutes.”

—Leslie Pesante, Head of Finance, Skillshare

According to Skillshare, “Tomorrow is for the taking.”

With 5 million members and over 20,000 classes in design, business, tech, and more, this online education community is available to anyone that’s willing to learn. Taught by the world’s leading practitioners, Skillshare is on a mission to connect curious, lifelong learners—from anywhere.

Built to fuel both creativity and career, the Skillshare platform allows their users to learn cutting-edge skills, share and collaborate with a growing community of 7 million creators, and actively discover new learning opportunities. All in pursuit of “taking tomorrow.”

But for Leslie Pesante, Head of Finance at Skillshare, this mantra was lost in the back-office drudgery of payments.

“In our old system, Bill.com, it was difficult to create all of our payments. We work with a lot of international social influencers, and we needed to pay these people in different markets. If we can’t pay them effectively, it limits our reach.”

Before Pesante started, Skillshare had a historic payables system and no finance team to speak of. It was on her to build out the entire organization and implement robust workflows that could effectively scale with the business.

“I knew we needed something better. We needed a solution to ensure that our operations were stable and running smoothly.”

For Skillshare, that meant prioritizing the relationship with the influencers that were actively spreading the word and bringing users to their platform.

“If you’re not paying people on time, you’re not professional. Having a best in class payments platform is a big benefit for our influencers.”

Skillshare needed a solution that could handle their high-growth. They needed a solution that could seamlessly sync with QuickBooks Online, help with their growing inter-national expansion, and manage robust invoice processing and payments. They needed Tipalti.

“It’s very important for Skillshare to have a platform like Tipalti. Providing people with a system where they can get paid on time, however they want, is a huge benefit of our platform.”

For Pesante and the finance team, the time-saving benefits were monumental.

“We used to spend three hours a week making payments. Now, it’s down to minutes.”

Plus, they gained a layer of added trust and financial controls. As Pesante states, “When you’re scheduling payments, you want things to happen the way you expect them to—that’s a really critical feature.”

So what’s the future for Skillshare? According to Pesante, it’s shifting focus to strategic financial forecasting and continuing to plan for their exponential growth.

“We’re definitely at a point where we know we’re meeting one of the objectives of the company—ensuring stability, scalability, and operational excellence. We need to ensure that our operations are running smoothly and that we can continue to scale in the coming years.”

And for payments?

“We have a seamless way of doing things now—with automation, we’re moving in the right direction.”