About Gremlin
Gremlin is a reliability management platform that enables engineering teams to measure, manage, and improve the reliability of their services and applications. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in the United States, Gremlin operates as a fully remote company with around 50 employees. Their product serves many of the largest and most trusted organizations globally, and their contracts span direct enterprise deals, marketplace transactions through AWS and GCP, and third-party resellers.
The Challenges
When Gremlin's previous subscription management platform announced a substantial price increase ahead of their December renewal, the team began evaluating alternatives.
The brief was narrow at first: find something that does what the current tool does, at a more reasonable cost. But as the evaluation progressed, the team began to surface problems that had been quietly worked around for years.
Late renewals were being miscounted as churn
In enterprise SaaS, it is common for a customer to let their contract lapse by a month or two during negotiations before signing the next year. Gremlin did not want to count that as churn, but their previous platform did. Every late renewal appeared in the data as a lost customer and a new customer in the same month, making the ARR waterfall, expansion tracking, and churn figures structurally inaccurate. The correction happened manually, every month, in a parallel spreadsheet.
Revenue complexity that required workarounds across the board
A significant portion of Gremlin's contracts flowed through cloud marketplaces, where the customer pays the provider, and Gremlin receives only the net amount after a platform cut. Another portion went through third-party resellers, where the invoice goes to the reseller, but the contract belongs to the end customer. Mid-year expansions, where a customer scales up partway through their term and owes the prorated difference, were also common. Each of these scenarios had its own manual workaround, and together they amounted to significant time and risk each month.
Subscription and services revenue tracked as one
Gremlin had two distinct revenue streams that needed to be kept separate:
- Subscription revenue tied to ARR, and services revenue from onboarding and
- Implementation engagements.
The previous platform treated both identically. Clean reporting on either required yet another manual adjustment.
By the time the evaluation was complete, the brief had changed. The team was not looking for a cheaper version of what they had. They were looking for something that actually handled the way Gremlin's business worked.
Finding the Right Platform
The team gave themselves six weeks between the price increase announcement and contract expiry to find and implement a replacement.
The criteria were specific:
- A clean Salesforce integration that could be triggered by sales ops validation rather than just deal close.
- Native ASC 606 revenue recognition
- The ability to separate subscription and services revenue into distinct accounts,
- And a way to handle late renewals without miscounting churn.
Several vendors were evaluated. Most could handle standard use cases. None could handle the edge cases that Gremlin required.
Why Zenskar
Zenskar was the only platform with a native pause-contract workflow, allowing a contract to be frozen between renewal periods without triggering a churn event.
It was also the only platform where the Salesforce integration was configurable enough to accommodate Gremlin's sales ops validation step before a contract ever touched the finance system.
Implementation
Gremlin's data migration was substantial. Close to a thousand contracts and active deals needed to be moved to Zenskar.
The Zenskar implementation team handled the migration end-to-end: customer data, product catalog, bulk contract import, Xero integration, Avalara setup for US tax, and a revenue rule library that split subscription and services revenue into separate GL accounts mapped cleanly through to Xero. The Gremlin team's role was to test, validate, and sign off.
More complex contracts required restructuring.
- Mid-year expansions, which Gremlin had previously managed through negative line items and manual reconciliation, were rebuilt as clean replacement contracts reflecting the correct adjusted value.
- Marketplace contracts were configured as their own category, correctly capturing net revenue.
- Reseller contracts were set up to route the invoice to the reseller while keeping the contract record under the end customer.
- Services contracts were separated out with their own billing cadence and revenue account, permanently removed from the ARR calculation.
All of the migration was completed in about 6 weeks, and Gremlin went live one day before their previous platform access expired.
The Results
An ARR Reporting the Team Can Trust
The parallel spreadsheet used to correct for churn miscounting no longer exists.
The ARR waterfall is generated directly from Zenskar and reflects how Gremlin actually thinks about its business.
Late renewals are now handled through the pause-contract workflow rather than being counted as churn events, and the numbers match reality without manual intervention afterward.
Month-end Close Runs on System-generated Journals
Revenue recognition now runs on ASC 606 rules, with subscription and services revenue tracked in separate accounts and exported as a Xero-ready journal entry for each close. The manual journal construction that previously consumed a meaningful portion of the month-end is now gone.
Same-day Invoice Delivery
Invoices go out the day a contract is processed. The Salesforce integration, triggered after sales ops validates the opportunity rather than at deal close, ensures no invoice leaves with incorrect dates or amounts.
When Gremlin transitioned its finance function to an external fractional finance team partway through the year, that team stepped into a system that was already live, already documented, and already trusted.
