When Helix Bio's CTO Sarah Kim sat down to audit the company's operational software stack in January 2026, she counted fourteen distinct tools across billing, project management, customer support, and engineering ops. By April, they were down to two. This is the story of how that happened, and what changed.
i.The challenge.
Helix Bio is a 240-person biotech company that closed its Series C in late 2024. By early 2026, the company had outgrown the ad-hoc operational stack that had carried them from twenty employees to two hundred and forty. The billing process — a critical revenue function — was distributed across six different tools with no shared source of truth.
The result was predictable. 22-day average billing cycles, four full-time operations engineers spending most of their week on reconciliation, and an embarrassing number of duplicated invoices that customers were politely flagging.
Every quarter, our CFO sent the leadership team a slide that read "billing is a billing-cycle-time problem and a billing-cycle-time problem only." After the third slide, we got the message.
ii.The decision.
The team evaluated five platforms over six weeks. Pacer was selected for three reasons:
- Native bidirectional Stripe sync. Every other tool wanted to reimplement payments. Pacer didn't.
- The cycle engine. Billing teams run on real cycles, not pretend sprints, and Pacer was the only platform whose model matched theirs.
- The price. Less than half of the next-cheapest enterprise plan, with SOC 2 + HIPAA included.
iii.The rollout.
Helix migrated 240 users and 14,000 active issues from Jira + Notion + Asana over fourteen weeks, with no business interruption. The migration ran in three waves of about 80 users each, allowing the ops team to refine the workspace structure before bringing the next cohort across.
iv.The metrics.
Twelve weeks after the final user migrated, the operations team ran a full audit against the pre-Pacer baseline. The headline numbers below are conservative — the team applied a 15% discount to "soft" metrics like time spent in meetings.
Before vs after · twelve-week audit
The Pacer migration paid for itself in 14 weeks. By the second quarter we were already net-positive against the implementation cost. I have not had a conversation about billing cycle time with our CEO since.
v.What's next.
With billing now running cleanly, the Helix Bio operations team has shifted attention to two new initiatives both running on Pacer: customer-success workflows for their 14 enterprise accounts, and a unified vendor-management workspace replacing a legacy Coupa instance. Both are expected to land by Q3 2026.