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About Thriva
Thriva is a UK-based health tech company running blood tests at scale, both direct-to-consumer and through institutional partners who need an end-to-end diagnostics infrastructure: sample collection, laboratory processing, and clinical result delivery. By 2025, their B2B contracts had grown sophisticated enough that finance needed a fundamentally different approach to manage them.
James has been Thriva's Finance Director since 2021, long enough to have watched their revenue operations grow more complex with every new partner they signed.
The Complexity That Broke Every Tool They Tried
Thriva's pricing is volume-based; partners pay per test ordered and per test analyzed, creating two separate billable events within every customer journey. On top of that, each test carries configurable add-ons: white labeling, blood collection method, and whether a clinician's report accompanies the result. And beneath all of that sit roughly 50 to 70 distinct test types that partners mix and match.
James, the Finance Director at Thriva, describes the resulting complexity like choosing pizza toppings.
Then there are failure rules. If a lab opens a kit and finds insufficient blood or an incorrect barcode, the sample is rejected, and the charge to the partner changes accordingly. Full analysis price, administration fee, or nothing, depending on the type of failure.
Each partner also carries their own configuration: volumetric discounts, different white-labelling arrangements, prepaid stock balances drawn down over time. No two contracts look alike.
As Thriva signed more significant contracts in 2025, the complexity of those contracts became a real constraint. Partners would be chasing their invoice on day five of the month. The team would still be working through it.
The finance function was spending the first week of every month not closing the books, but catching up with them.
What Made Zenskar the Right Fit
James had been looking for a solution since he joined Thriva in 2021. He evaluated Maxio, Chargebee, Charify, and SaaS Optics across 2022 and 2023. None of them could handle Thriva's contract structure. As he saw it, those tools are designed for SaaS businesses where deals broadly follow the same shape. Thriva's model is fundamentally different.
When no platform fit, the team built a workaround using Omni, their BI tool, on top of BigQuery. Their data engineers could write bespoke SQL to generate order-to-cash outputs.
It solved the immediate problem, but created a new one. The data team was being pulled away from analytics and forecasting into order-to-cash operations. Every new billable metric meant raising a data ticket and waiting. It was a brittle solution, not a scalable one.
By 2025, James started looking again. In the end, Zenskar stood out.
Zenskar's native BigQuery integration meant Thriva could connect directly to their existing data infrastructure. Finance could define complex pricing logic without raising engineering tickets. And the platform was flexible enough to model the kind of per-partner, per-test-type, rule-based configuration that every other tool had turned away from.
Going Live Without Slowing Down
The implementation was not a simple install. Thriva was configuring Zenskar at the same time as they were onboarding new partners with some of the most complex contracts they'd ever signed.
Part of the challenge wasn't in the tooling alone; it was in upstream quoting and contracting processes that hadn't been built for this level of volume or variety.
Zenskar's onboarding team worked through that alongside Thriva rather than treating it as something to resolve before the engagement could begin. That partnership through complexity was part of what James had been looking for.
What the First Day of Every Month Looks Like Now
Invoices Out on Day 1, Down from Day 5
Thriva can now send invoices the day after the month-end. Before, it could take up to five days, and that was before accounting for errors that came back requiring rework. The process that once consumed the first week of every month now happens on the first day of it.
Month-End Close on Day 3-4, Down from Day 8
With invoices going out immediately and revenue operations running through a single system, Thriva now closes the books on day three or four. Previously, close was happening on day eight. That's nearly a full week returned to the finance team every month, time that's now spent on analysis and value creation rather than reconciliation and corrections.
10-15% Efficiency Gain Across the Finance Team
James estimates that the cumulative time savings and reduction in rework add up to roughly a 10 to 15% efficiency gain across his team. The biggest shift is the elimination of context switching. With spreadsheet-based processes, a single pricing change could cascade into hours of corrections. That fragility is gone.
Revenue Leakage: Now Visible and Recoverable
Before Zenskar, Thriva didn't have reliable visibility into whether every test combination and every partner configuration was being captured correctly in their order-to-cash process. James acknowledges the scope of underbilling in the prior year was likely a material sum, one the team couldn't confidently calculate without a system built to track it. That visibility now exists.
The Shift That's Hardest to Put a Number On
The finance team at Thriva is no longer spending the first week of every month in reactive mode. That change in posture, from operational firefighting to strategic contribution, is what James returns to most often when describing what's different now.
