Orb overcomes NetSuite complexity to advance enterprise deals

Orb is a revenue design platform for AI and SaaS companies, unifying pricing, billing, and revenue intelligence around raw usage data. Founded in 2021, Orb is trusted by today’s leading AI-native companies and enterprises, such as Vercel, Replit, and Supabase. Supporting its enterprise customers requires accurate, compliant billing data across ERPs, most notably NetSuite.

Like many software companies serving enterprise finance teams, Orb needed its usage-based billing engine to fit the systems its customers already relied on. However, its existing NetSuite integration didn’t yet meet enterprise accounting and reporting requirements, leaving some of its most valuable deals at risk. For roughly six months, a stronger integration was the sales team’s top request and the biggest pain point for existing customers.

Lucia Zhang, Product Lead at Orb, and her team of six were tasked with spearheading a V2 of Orb’s NetSuite integration. They had built the V1 with an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) vendor, but found that the partnership fell short on technical collaboration, domain expertise, and availability. Bringing in other partners to help didn’t change the outcome. Lucia came away with “a very skeptical doomsday impression” that nobody truly knew how to build for NetSuite.

Much of the difficulty was NetSuite itself. NetSuite is notoriously difficult to integrate with, and it is also a critical piece of software in the enterprise. Many of Orb’s NetSuite customers are public, global companies with stringent requirements, down to tax handling for individual Canadian provinces. Connecting the systems wasn’t enough. Every record had to arrive complete and correct – the relationships need to be correct, and “every single decimal point needs to be rock solid,” Lucia explains.

Those same customers also carried years of inherited processes, protocols, and tech debt that made each implementation complex. Lucia didn’t want to build custom integrations for hundreds of customers. She needed one integration that could handle the full range of enterprise use cases, along with the judgment to recognize which requests were one-off workarounds.

When a mutual investor introduced Ampersand, Lucia and her engineers evaluated its technical approach and NetSuite expertise. Subsequent conversations with the broader team showed that Ampersand had the domain knowledge and implementation support Orb needed, and Lucia confidently moved forward with the partnership.

Lucia chose Ampersand’s integration infrastructure to stand up Orb’s V2 NetSuite integration. Her team worked directly with Ampersand’s engineers through development and implementation, getting technical answers and guidance on the workflows the integration needed to support. “Ampersand brought the technical depth and NetSuite expertise we needed, then went further with implementation, customer support, and debugging,” Lucia shares.

With that support, Lucia’s team implemented Orb’s billing engine to each customer’s NetSuite account. Orb produces the billing records, while Ampersand’s NetSuite integration handles authenticated calls that create or update the corresponding records. A finalized invoice reaches NetSuite with its line-item amounts, quantities, and service periods represented in native records. Finance teams receive the information needed to apply their existing accounting rules and reconcile billing activity. For Lucia, that closes the gap between the billing engine and the accounting workflows enterprise customers depend on.

Lucia continues to rely on Ampersand’s NetSuite expertise as her team builds the product. When a request reflects an inherited NetSuite process, she asks Ampersand’s specialists to assess whether it belongs in the shared integration or needs a different approach. Their recommendations help her accommodate accounting and reporting requirements across differently configured accounts without commissioning a separate build for each one.

Ampersand’s support extends to the conversations that help Orb win and onboard enterprise customers. Ampersand engineers join pre-sales calls to clarify requirements and set expectations with Orb’s account team, then help customers configure the integration and resolve implementation issues. That gives sales the technical backing to move NetSuite discussions toward a buying decision and follow through during onboarding. “Ampersand shows up as the experts in the room,” Lucia shares. “They instill a lot of confidence.”

Lucia also benefits from her feedback being heard and used to improve Ampersand. One example was Ampersand’s debugging tools. When she asked for easier ways to locate specific records, Ampersand improved the record-search functionality. Those changes make it easier for her team to investigate customer questions and bring the relevant records into discussions with Ampersand’s engineers.

With Ampersand, Orb turned a recurring obstacle in its most valuable enterprise deals into an integration that the sales team trusts. Now, Lucia is improving an established product experience, while sales enters NetSuite conversations with confidence that Orb will support each customer’s accounting and reporting needs.

Looking ahead, Lucia aims to expand Orb’s expert-services partnership with Ampersand so its specialists handle more frontline NetSuite debugging and troubleshooting, giving her engineers more time to advance and refine the core product.