‘AI has massive potential in accounting – but so do people skills’ > Lydia Stone, VP Finance & Chief Accounting Officer, Chargebee

The Friday after Thanksgiving in the US, now known globally as Black Friday, is an important day for Lydia Stone, who is based in Washington, D.C. As vice president of finance and chief accounting officer for global revenue growth management platform Chargebee, leading up to the holiday, she manages staff and meets teams and customers all over the world, from India to Australia. Her day often begins at 5 a.m.

That’s why Black Friday is so important—not just from a business strategy perspective (Chargebee works with customers to configure pricing and discounts and experiment with pricing models) but also because it means Stone can stock up on coffee pods.

“I load up on my Nespresso pods because they’re half off,” she says excitedly. “They’re $5 per packet versus $10. So 5 am is getting up, and getting a strong dose of coffee. I have a professional grade Nespresso with 10 different flavours of coffee.”

A normal working day for Stone might begin with calls with her team in India, followed by helping her son get out the door for high school. Then, she’s back online with her team again and, later in the day, meets with teams on the West Coast. 

Founded in 2011 and based in San Francisco, Chargebee is a revenue growth management platform. Companies use Chargebee’s software to acquire, grow, retain, and manage their customers – who live and work in 227 countries and territories globally. Stone joined three years ago after working in senior accounting roles for a number of tech organisations. With teams and customers spread around the world – including in Australia – sometimes there’s another meeting at 8 pm or 10 pm.

It’s usually too late then for another coffee but Stone says she perks up talking to people.

“I love meeting with people – that really energizes me,” she says. “My energy is low after all the meetings but during the meetings, I don’t feel tired at all. I take breaks during the day: a little bit of yoga, take the dog for a walk, do jumping jacks and sometimes I’ll take a quick nap, just to reset myself. It’s really, really important.”

Like many financial professionals, Stone started her career at a Big Four accounting firm, enjoying the structure of a large firm and working with numbers. “But what I didn’t realise is that the biggest thing I really enjoy is to be able to tell the stories behind the numbers and have people say, ‘Oh, I see how that came about’. Every number is a story,” she says.

At Ernst and Young, she worked with a publicly listed client for seven years. “I saw how the public views the numbers: the annual filings, the quarterly filings, and how the numbers impact their market, their stock price. It went up and went down, went up and down. People are interpreting the numbers the way they do, even though the underlying company may not ever have changed,” she says.

“It made me realise the stories behind the numbers are super important.”

People, process and technology

Being able to look beyond the figures to people and processes, is a strategy Stone has carried with her throughout her career, from working for $10 billion aerospace and defense company BAE Systems to seven years with health startup Evolent Health, which she joined when it made less than a million dollars a year.

“I started talking to these people and could see how passionate they were about their company and their mission and the technology they were creating. And it just made so much sense to me. I was like, ‘Wow, I want to be part of it’.”

By the time she left, Evolent had made a billion dollars and went public. It reiterated her belief that there’s more to an organisation than its bottom line. “You make sure the numbers are right, and you know the stories behind the numbers,” she says.

While Stone looks back proudly at the practical things she achieved in that role—she wrote the first contract in Evolent and built the finance systems, for example—she is most proud of the role she played in team building, communication, and people strategy.

“I was the head of accounting as well over there so I hand-picked every single person on the accounting side. When we were small, nobody knew about us. We would be desiring certain talent and they would say, ‘You’re so small. I’m not sure it’s safe to go with you guys.”

While communicating and people skills are not considered classic accounting skills, Stone says they are key to finance roles. “I called people, I took people to lunch and I did everything to attract talent to us and sell them the dreams that I was sold.”

Onwards and upwards

In 2020, Stone left to join Blackboard, an education technology company that had grown significantly overnight during COVID lockdowns. “The entire world needed a blackboard”.

“They sought an opportunity to sell so I went in to help them prepare for sale and 18 months later we sold in a $2 billion deal.”

Ready to move into something for the longer term, Stone joined Chargebee in 2021. A cloud-based technology company servicing middle office operations in accounting and finance teams, the product is run on a subscription model and is used by Stone herself at Chargebee. “What we use, what we produce for our customers, is exactly what my team uses. I am our customer,” she says.

The software is used by many SaaS and subscription-based companies, including sandwich shop Pret a Manger, car brand Toyota, and appointment scheduler Calendly. Chargebee powers the technology behind their subscription services, whether a six-month coffee subscription from a sandwich shop or a yearly subscription to a calendar service.

Stone believes we’re only just seeing the start of the growth of subscription services. According to Forbes, this market is projected to be worth US$1.5 trillion ($2.4 trillion) in 2025, up from $650 billion in 2020. 

“If you look at your life or my life, our lives are mostly run by subscription now,” says Stone. “I have a Prime membership with Amazon. That’s a subscription. I have Netflix. That’s a subscription. I subscribe to a $99 per month self-driving option. I subscribe to HelloFresh. And I subscribe to Rent the Runway for work attire. It caters to customer preferences for convenience and flexibility. And when the customer loves it, they’re willing to spend money. And the investors love it because it’s so predictable.”

“Our customers use Chargebee to enable their customers to reach them in a much easier way so they don’t have to spend money on marketing or personally make contact with the customer.”

AI has massive potential in accounting

Another technology Stone is passionate about is artificial intelligence (AI). She has seen it drive efficiency, value, and innovation across the finance industry.

“Accounting is no longer the briefcase with the glasses and the tie,” she says. “With evolving technology, a lot of the manual, tedious work of accountants has been automated. There are so many great tools out there and with machine learning, with AI, it’s just going to be unstoppable. Push a few buttons and it’s done.

“Then it’s come to the subjective pieces of things where you have to talk to people, to interpret it, interpret, translate the business situation into, ah, how do I book this? How do I close the books? I would say that finance and accounting have shifted from focusing on numbers to becoming partners and advisers.”

2025 and beyond

As for 2025 and beyond, Stone is excited about Chargebee and leveraging AI-driven innovations to enhance the product, making it more impactful for customers. “From our function perspective, a lot of what we do is going to be solidifying what we’ve done in the past three years and continuing to mature as a function to be a good business partner operationally to support our front-end teams.

“The way to do it in this day and age, especially with the mix of AI and machine learning, is to upscale our digital talent. But automation is only the first step. How do you then integrate this newer technology to make it even more efficient and more fun, really? It’s about exchanging ideas and being creative and saying, how do we do this better?”

There are those people skills again. And, through it all, she’ll no doubt be keeping her energy levels high. “I wouldn’t take my energy down for anything because no matter what the situation has become, I’ll find my passion within.”

One piece of advice to fellow finance leaders to help navigate the next 12 months

“I guess the word that comes to mind is adaptability; being able to adapt because any day could be different. Who thought Chargebee would take off the way it did, who thought Tesla would change our car world, Who thought Trump would come back as president? You just never know. Things can shift overnight, and it takes time to adjust. The trick is to roll with the changes and keep doing your best, no matter what comes your way.”