Revenue operations - the commercial ledger under the deals (2014–present)

The situation

The publisher business runs with no finance-operations function between the sales team and issued revenue. For roughly nine years from when I joined, I personally generated every invoice the business issued - campaign IOs, SaaS subscriptions, project fees, renewals, and the seven-figure the conglomerate group reconciliation, all of it. By 2018, only two people in the company issued invoices: the CEO and me. Mine were recognisable from the layout alone - line items split by service type, IO and BO numbers carried into the line items themselves from the first invoice I issued, the structure designed for traceability under audit, dispute, or downstream reconciliation. The handoff of invoice issuance to a dedicated finance team member happened in 2024 when the system migrated to the group's ERP stack. The architecture, the reconciliation discipline, the tax treatment logic, and the handoff workflow itself remained mine.

The tax layer

Underneath the invoicing was the tax treatment that nobody else in the company carried operationally. I went for the GST training when it was first implemented in 2015, then carried the company through the SST transition in 2018 - the Group G versus Group I distinctions, the inter-industry exemptions (media-to-media no SST, media-to-client SST applies), the foreign-services exemptions for cross-border sales, the eventual digital tax and Facebook withholding tax additions. By the second year of SST, the CEO himself was asking me about treatment on specific deals. I built the calculators the team uses for Facebook boost pricing (inclusive of management fee, agency commission, 10% withholding tax citing Section 107A CP 37A, and 8% digital tax). I documented the scenarios - agencies, principals, photography services, events vendors - so the sales team could answer client questions without escalation. The tax mastery was self-taught through operational necessity and twelve years of cross-checking against accountants.

The system today

Each week, three sales managers submit pipeline lists. I reconcile them against a master invoicing jobsheet - monthly tabs, a fixed multi-field structure carrying every campaign from signed IO through to issued invoice reference, with tax treatment governed per transaction: 8% SST for direct clients, Group I Services exemption for qualifying agency bookings, and exported-service exemption for foreign clients. In parallel I run a forward pipeline that prorates retainer commitments across remaining contract months and tracks ad-hoc project revenue - a live month-by-month view of committed and forecast revenue across the whole book.

The handoff architecture

When invoice issuance moved to the finance manager in 2024, I designed the workflow that gates the handoff: a weekly Larksheet where I upload PO/BO and signed IO, the finance manager creates the invoice in the ERP and puts it back, and I send it out. The reason I held the issuance and dispatch step rather than passing the whole chain to sales-direct-to-the finance manager is structural - sales tends to take shortcuts (signed IOs not collected, cc loops missed), each invoice carries nuance the issuer needs to preserve, and the translation from IO to invoice is faster when someone with full context processes it first. Same logic applied to the digital side - monthly jobsheet updates that feed the finance manager's invoice creation.

The discipline

The work lives in the reconciliation: catching a single campaign booked under two different names across two managers' lists before it doubles an invoice; catching a transposed invoice reference pointing at an unrelated prior-year document; flagging an IO date error before it ships. The seven-figure the conglomerate group wallet is reconciled inside this same system - each operating unit's draws tracked against one committed group wallet, with overutilisation charges raised when an OU exceeds allocation.

What this shows

Commercial architecture, tax operations, and revenue integrity are the same job. The deal does not exist until the ledger says it does. The ledger only stays clean because someone is doing the reconciliation discipline weekly. The tax treatment only holds because someone has read the underlying regulations and translated them into operational rules. For nine years I was that someone for issuance and for tax. The handoff was designed to preserve the structure when I stopped doing the routine work.