Why We Built Turnstile

There's a moment every founder or head of finance recognizes. It's when you realize your billing spreadsheet has become mission-critical infrastructure.

It started as a quick workaround. A Google Sheet to track what you quoted, what you invoiced, who actually paid. Maybe a few formulas to calculate MRR. Now it has 37 columns to track all the permutations of pricing, tiers, and discounts you've given. It's the only thing standing between you and revenue chaos. Multiple people have edited it with no audit trail. The formulas are brittle. And you're terrified to touch it because if something breaks, you're not sure you can fix it.

We built Turnstile because we have had our own mission critical spreadsheets. 

Before Turnstile, we built Second Measure, a company we eventually sold to Bloomberg. We experienced every one of these pain points firsthand; the spreadsheets that became load-bearing infrastructure, the reconciliation marathons that required manual deep dives so that we could get confident in our own numbers. We knew there had to be a better way.

Every deal is a little different

That's the reality of selling, especially when you're growing. A customer wants quarterly billing instead of annual. Another needs a ramp; half price for the first six months, then full price after that. Someone negotiates a discount that doesn't fit your standard tiers, or asks for usage-based pricing on top of a platform fee.

You say yes, because that's how you win deals. And then you forget all about it until you have to send the first invoice.

This is where the real pain begins.

The quote lives in Docusign. The pricing calculation lives in a spreadsheet. The contract terms live in a Google Doc. The customer record lives in your CRM. The invoice lives in Bill.com or Stripe or QuickBooks. And none of these systems talk to each other and, critically, none were built to help sales-led businesses like yours.

So you become the human integration layer. You're spending hours every month reconciling your CRM with your quote spreadsheet with your invoice tracker with your accounting system and they never quite match. You find invoices that went out with the wrong amount. You discover customers who haven't been billed in months because someone forgot to set up the recurring charge. Unpaid invoices pile up because you don't have a single view of what's outstanding and what's overdue.

The cumulative cost is staggering. We've talked to founders who discovered six or even seven figures of revenue leakage, money they'd earned but never collected, simply because their systems couldn't keep up with the deals they'd closed.

Sound familiar?

And then comes the board meeting. Or the fundraise. You need accurate revenue numbers, and you need them broken down by customer, by cohort, by month. You're pulling an all-nighter to build a report from four different sources, and when you're done, you're not entirely sure you trust it. Neither are your investors.

The tools that exist weren't built for this

Enterprise CPQ solutions assume you have a stable product catalog, a pricing committee, a dedicated rev ops team, and six months to implement. They're built for companies with 50-person sales teams and rigid approval workflows. They’re built to lock down your sales reps not to help you close deals. They’re designed this way because the rest of your revenue stack would break without these limits. 

Simple invoicing tools assume every deal looks the same. Monthly subscription, same price, same terms. They break the moment you need to handle a mid-contract amendment or a custom billing schedule.

Neither category works when you're a founder closing deals yourself, or a head of finance who inherited a tangle of disconnected tools. You need flexibility to match how you actually sell. But you also need automation so you're not manually recreating every deal in three different systems.

That gap - between flexibility and automation - is exactly where growing companies get stuck. And until Turnstile, there hasn't been a self-service option. Every quote-to-cash platform on the market requires a 3-6 month implementation, dedicated administrators, and often six-figure contracts. The tools built to solve this problem have been out of reach for the companies that need them most.

Quote-to-cash isn't your top priority. And it shouldn't be.

Here's the founder's dilemma: your focus belongs on product, customers, and growth. Those are the things that move your business forward. Quote-to-cash work isn't what gets you excited in the morning.

But it can't be ignored. Errors are costly, not just in dollars, but in credibility. Customers notice when invoices are wrong. Delays hurt cash flow. And investors notice when your numbers don't hold up to scrutiny or when you can't produce them without a week of manual work.

The answer isn't to spend more time on quote-to-cash. It's to spend radically less, while getting it right every time.

Deal-level flexibility with downstream automation

That's the core idea behind Turnstile—and we've even made it self-service. Sign up, connect your CRM, and generate your first quote in minutes. No consultants. No IT projects. No waiting.

Structure each deal the way it needs to be structured, in minutes. Custom terms, usage-based components, multi-year ramps, mid-contract amendments, whatever the customer needs to say yes. The flexibility is at the deal level, where it belongs.

Then let everything downstream flow automatically. Quotes become contracts, invoices become recognized revenue, without manual translation at every step. Change something in the contract, and the billing schedule updates automatically. No re-entry. No reconciliation. No "I thought we fixed that."

This is what we mean by a single source of truth. Not just a place where data is stored, but a system where every customer relationship, what you agreed to, what you've billed, what's been paid, when the renewal is coming, lives in one place and stays in sync.

Before a customer call, you pull up their record and see the complete picture in 30 seconds. Before a board meeting, you pull the revenue dashboard and trust the numbers. Before a fundraise, you export the data and know it will hold up to diligence.

Quote-to-cash becomes something that runs in the background, not something that consumes your weekends.

Who we built this for

We built Turnstile for founders who are still closing deals themselves and can't afford to spend hours on billing admin. For heads of finance who need to bring order to the chaos without a six-month implementation project. For sales leaders who want their reps focused on selling, not wrestling with quote revisions and approval workflows.

For teams that need precision without complexity. Who have outgrown spreadsheets but aren't ready for enterprise software that assumes they have a department to run it. Who want to be up and running in an afternoon, not six months from now.

For anyone who's looked at their quote-to-cash process and thought: there has to be a better way.

There is. That's why we built Turnstile.

Ready to see how it works? Get started with Turnstile →