HiBid is the premier auction platform that lets auctioneers run live webcast, internet-only, and absentee-bidding sales through a single platform. Thousands of auction companies worldwide use HiBid to sell a range of assets, from real estate to collectibles, sports memorabilia, and personal property. With more than 4.2M registered bidders, the platform has moved over $2.1B in gross merchandise value (GMV) across 82,502 auctions in a single year.
Dual business model outgrew manual order-to-cash processes
When Chris Stiegal joined HiBid as CFO in January 2025, he stepped into a high-volume finance operation whose manual processes couldn’t keep pace with growth. Alongside its marketplace, the company offers vertical software that auctioneers use to manage customer relationships, inventory, and operations. With revenue spanning four major streams and more than 50 sub-streams, modernizing revenue and cash workflows became increasingly important.
Managing the complexity of this business model took days each month. Each stream is recognized on a different schedule, requiring the team to export hundreds of thousands of transaction line items and manually calculate balances in Excel. This work pulled time away from the variance analysis and budget-versus-actuals reporting needed to understand HiBid’s performance and plan liquidity.
Because the workbook reached 300 MB, processing also required dedicated computing resources, hard-coded formulas, and careful file management to prevent recalculation errors.
That challenge extended to cash reconciliation. HiBid billed customers in advance, at the point of sale, and in arrears, while payments arrived by check, wire, ACH, and multiple payment processors. With billing and payment data spread across systems and payment methods, the team had to manually determine what had been collected, what remained in accounts receivable (AR), and what was still in transit.
Without a consolidated view of the data, Chris and his team found it harder to prepare for audits, spot deeper financial performance trends, and build granular forecasts. In turn, this delayed decision-making around capital allocation and future growth initiatives, including product investment and go-to-market priorities.
Chris had attempted to integrate the company’s data warehouse with NetSuite to streamline order-to-cash operations. But even after nearly three months and significant engineering support, the system could not reliably handle HiBid’s transaction volume, varied revenue streams, and complex recognition rules.
As an early adopter of AI agents, Chris had seen their potential to accelerate financial analysis and automate routine work. However, after experimenting with generic AI tools like Codex and Claude Code, he found they couldn’t consistently produce the controlled, accurate data required for HiBid’s order-to-cash workflows.
Faced with these constraints, Chris began exploring AI-native solutions that could layer on top of HiBid’s systems. He evaluated several platforms, but none could support HiBid’s disparate data sources and complex accounting practices.
Chris found the right partner in Maximor. Its multi-source data integration, AI-native capabilities, and deep accounting knowledge provided the financial foundation for HiBid’s continued growth.
“Our revenue recognition, billing, and cash collections were spread across different systems, which made them very manual and complicated. No solution could grasp the challenges and the exceptions that we were dealing with, until Maximor.”
AI agents automate revenue recognition and cash reconciliation
HiBid integrated Maximor into its existing environment without disrupting the systems in place. From there, the Maximor team connected HiBid’s data sources, including its data warehouse, Chargebee, and multiple payment processors. “I was amazed by how quickly they consolidated our data with little engineering effort,” says Chris.
Working closely with the HiBid team, Maximor then configured the platform around HiBid’s order-to-cash workflows, revenue-recognition policies, and business-specific exceptions. They also introduced a shared Slack channel and a Friday touch-base meeting to ensure smooth adoption. The result was a unified finance context layer that enables Maximor’s agents to handle HiBid’s order-to-cash processes.
“The Maximor team became true partners from the start. They took joint ownership of our close process and exchanged ideas with us on how to introduce automation in the right places.”
As HiBid brought the new workflow into day-to-day use, Chris compared revenue-recognition data in Maximor. The review revealed a small variance between Maximor’s calculations and HiBid’s prior numbers. This enabled the team to improve the accuracy of its revenue recognition, giving Chris greater confidence in Maximor’s output and the accuracy of HiBid’s financials.
Today, Maximor’s agents continuously pull transaction reports from the data warehouse and Chargebee, match them to the right revenue stream, and apply the right recognition policies. With this repeatable workflow in place, Chris and his finance team have a granular, reliable view of recognized and deferred revenue by customer, product, and revenue stream.
When Maximor encounters an unfamiliar transaction, it flags the exception for HiBid’s finance team and provides the relevant context for review. The team can then explain the appropriate treatment in plain language without extensive manual investigation. That guidance becomes part of HiBid’s operating context, enabling the agents to handle similar scenarios independently.
As Maximor takes on more of HiBid’s routine revenue-recognition work, the finance team can spend more time on higher-value work, such as variance analysis and budget-versus-actuals reporting. As a result, the team can give leadership earlier visibility into the revenue streams driving performance, where results are diverging from plan, and where to focus additional investment.
Maximor’s agents also ingest Chargebee, payment-processor, and bank-account data continuously, matching, classifying, reconciling, and posting routine cash transactions. As a result, Chris and his team have daily cash visibility, helping them identify cash received, funds still in transit, and amounts that remain outstanding in AR. That view simplifies audit preparation through clear balance documentation while enabling more precise forecasting and treasury decisions.
With Maximor as HiBid’s automated finance foundation, Chris and his team can plan liquidity with greater confidence, make informed growth decisions, and continue expanding automation to close faster and provide deeper financial insights.
“Maximor sits on top of every system our financials touch. The agents continuously apply our policies across processes, freeing our accountant to focus on analyzing HiBid’s performance and advising on business initiatives.”
HiBid saves 50+ hours every month with Maximor
With Maximor, HiBid automated order-to-cash workflows across its finance data sources, reducing the month-end close from weeks to days and securing daily cash visibility. This shift gives Chris and his team more time for higher-value work that surfaces performance trends, strengthens forecasting, and informs liquidity and investment decisions.
What’s next?
Looking ahead, Chris plans to extend Maximor’s agents from cash inflows into cash outflows, automating accruals, prepaids, and fixed assets. As HiBid brings additional businesses into the company through M&A, this expanding automation can provide a consistent way to scale the finance function and support the company’s growth.
“We are continuously exploring how we can expand Maximor across our processes. Our goal is to move finance closer to the business and make more time for strategic finance.”