SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Doing more with less: Increasing productivity for finance teams
15 Jun 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
you are listening to conversations with nathan latka where i sit down and interview the top sas founders like eric juan from zoom if you'd like to subscribe go to getlatka.com we've published thousands of these interviews and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn cac valuation or other metrics the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool it's like a big excel sheet for all these podcast interviews
Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Can you guys hear me okay? Great. So Mesh, just a little bit about Mesh before we begin. We're on a mission to automate and reduce the friction of corporate spend management. So we want to allow finance organizations to control their spend and boost their productivity. Great.
Chapter 2: How can finance teams automate their processes?
So we help some of the world's largest global companies control their spend. So as you're well aware, the current macroeconomic environment has really forced finance teams to really focus on reducing costs and becoming more agile, right? So less time spent on the manual arduous month-end close processes and more time spent on creating higher value reporting KPIs and metrics.
You hear a lot about doing more with less, but it's really about doing more with less manual work, so automation. And so to begin, I wanted to poll the audience. How many people spend less than 10 days on their month-end closed process? Okay. Less than 20? Does anybody know? And more than 20.
Chapter 3: What are common productivity killers for finance teams?
So typically, companies spend between 10 to 20 days on their month-end close process. And I had a great mentor early in my career who encouraged me to automate as much as I could so that I could spend my time really focused on creating dashboards, KPIs, metrics, pricing analysis,
modeling different areas of the business and really adding value to the executive team and the strategy, helping with the strategy of the company. So that's my goal today is to encourage you to go back to your finance teams and think about how you can automate. So why does it take so long to close month end? Well, it's because of these productivity killers.
It's these manual processes that are repetitive, redundant. It's pulling data from different sources. I was speaking to someone earlier about you have to pull data from the production team or operations in order to bill your customers. You have to pull data from the CRM system.
Chapter 4: How can finance teams identify areas for automation?
to calculate commissions for the month. And so finding all these different data sources, sometimes you have to wait for a vendor to send you invoices and then manually entering that into your accounting system. It really slows down the process. So data silos, unstructured data can take your team a long time during month end. And then of course my least favorite is chasing down receipts.
We all hate to be the person who has to nag the sales team to submit their expense reports. And so automating as much as that, creating a process which reduces the friction within the overall organization is really critical. So, I was talking to Ray earlier. So many companies have been started and successful in helping the R&D teams or the sales and marketing teams.
And it's just recently that we're really starting to talk about the CFO tech stack, which is great.
Chapter 5: What examples illustrate successful automation in finance?
As a CFO, I love it. I'm so happy to hear about all these companies that have been been founded and created to help the finance organization. So how do you make this decision about automating? Where do you begin? I think it's really important to take a look at your current processes, right? Map out where your team is spending their time. What are those different data sources that they need?
And where are the biggest holdups during the month-end process? What's taking the most time?
Chapter 6: How can technology improve finance team efficiency?
And then really define what's the strategy? What are the goals that you are trying to accomplish? Obviously, you want to automate, but maybe there's some reporting that you need to help the business, right? Really thinking through that end goal. And then going through all the different processes where you can reduce those inefficiencies. I suggest starting really simple, right?
Once you start implementing a solution that takes up a lot of time, once you get that in place, it frees you up the next month to work on something else. And you gain a lot more time for your team, and it kind of continues from there. I suggest looking at all the different solutions out there when you're looking to solve your AR problems, for example.
make sure that they can connect to your existing systems.
Chapter 7: What factors should be considered when selecting finance tech solutions?
Make sure that your ERP and that AR system can connect. It also works with your operations team, right? So you're solving the problems, not just for your short-term, but for long-term growth as well. I wanted to give an example of what I did at my prior company. We had a very manual billing process.
We needed to pull data, literally copy and paste data from our production site into an Excel spreadsheet, do manipulations, calculations in that Excel spreadsheet, then key it into our accounting system. And that was our month end close process. And every month the CEO would be like on top of my, you know, in my office asking me, What's our revenue for the month?
I couldn't give them that answer until five, 10 days later, until we did that whole process.
Chapter 8: How can finance teams enhance their strategic role in organizations?
So what I did is I first, I made sure we had buy-in from the R&D team. I stole a development resource. We created a data warehouse to automatically, the first of the month, have all that data at our fingertips. We connected our ERP system so we were able to see pricing. And then we connected it to Power BI so we could see in Power BI on the first of the month what our revenue was for that month.
And even better, we started to be able to see month to date. So during the month, we could forecast what our current revenue that we've generated was for that month. and we connected our CRM and our pipeline data so we could see for that month, we could forecast with really high accuracy how the month was gonna end up. So he no longer had to wait until the 10th of the month.
He knew the revenue for that month by the end of the month. So just an example of things that the finance team can do to help automate and reduce the time it takes to close. I really like this chart because it shows the time that most finance teams spends are really on low value tasks. And the high value tasks, they don't get to spend a lot of time on.
And so I would like to see this look more like a funnel, right? So at the bottom, it's the smallest part of that funnel and you're not spending as much time on the transactions, right? That's chasing receipts, that's pulling data from different sources. but really the team is spending the most time on the strategic finance.
That's creating the reports, that's doing pricing, looking at different products, and helping the product team decide, okay, let's prioritize this on the roadmap because we can generate this much revenue or profitability, right? These are all the things that is important to the company, but also important for retention.
It's a highly competitive market out there, and finance talent is really hard to find. your finance team wants to spend more times on the strategic items, right? They don't want to spend time doing data entry, although maybe there's someone out there who loves data entry. I think it's few and far between. And so it's also a retention tool.
It's a way to get your finance team excited and feeling like a part of the strategy, a part of improving and accelerating the company's growth. So great news, as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of companies focused on the CFO tech stack. And so I highly encourage you to go through this process and look at all the amazing vendors that are out there.
Again, when you're making these decisions, make sure that they integrate with your existing or future systems. But there's something for every part of your finance organization, right? Payroll, budgeting, forecast, benchmarking, what we do, corporate spend management at Mesh, equity management. So there's so many amazing companies out there
I highly recommend taking a look, seeing what will work for your team and implementing a more efficient process. So to close, right, automation can help alleviate a lot of those productivity killers and really improve
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