How Mesh Payments CEO Eran Katoni grew Mesh Payments to $5M revenue with a 172 person team in 2024.

can you guys hear me okay great uh 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 the spend and boost their productivity great okay so we help some of the world's largest global companies control their spent um so as you're well aware the current macro economic environment has really forced Finance teams to uh 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 right so Automation and so to begin I'll I wanted to pull the audience how many people spend more than or less than 10 days on their month-end close process okay less than 20. does anybody know and more than 20. so typically companies spend you know between 10 to 20 days on their month and 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 focus 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 um so why does it take so long to close month end well it's because of these productivity Killers right it's these manual processes that are repetitive redundant it's pulling data from different sources I was speaking to someone earlier about you know you have to pull data from uh the production team or operations right in order to build your customers you have to pull data from the CRM system 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 right we all hate to be the person who has to nag you know 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 um so uh you know 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 as a CFO I love it I'm so happy to hear about all these companies that are um that have been founded and created to help the finance organization so how do you make this decision about um automating where do you begin I think it's really important to take a look at your current processes right map out what where your team is spending their time what are those different data sources that they uh they need and where are those the biggest hold UPS during the month end process what's taking the most time 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'd 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 uh for your team and to 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 make sure that your Erp and that AR system can connect that 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 uh 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 right I couldn't give them that answer until five ten days later right until we did that whole process um 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 Empower 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 today 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 going to 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 um that you 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 team 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 that the bottom it's the smallest uh 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 um 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 and Trail 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 this these decisions look 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 um so to close right automation can help alleviate a lot of those productivity killers and really improve how your Finance organization works with the rest of the organization with the r d with the sales really becoming a partner instead of just spending most of their time working a month end any questions yes so it's required to wire up two different pieces of the tech stack yep your structure what do you think the ideal um skill set is for finance professional making um wanting to make these changes or is this really always a collaboration that requires engineering resources to be involved what's the realistic expectation there yeah I think the great news is you know the the the finance team that is graduating that's right out of college they're already very tech savvy right they've grown up most of their lives with technology and so I do think there's a lot of amazing talent out there that can help move a lot of this stuff there will be some in most cases right every company is different but in most cases you will need to partner with your r d hopefully the company has already thought through but we know a lot of companies you know uh are running so quickly they don't think through some of these processes and how it impacts the finance organization but yes you will need to partner with r d sometimes with a bi team to get some of this data point but again I think it's easy to make that pitch to The the executive leadership team right it's really easy to to agree to I know r d resources are actually expensive and and hard to come by but when you see the outcome and we see the output and how much more visibility the team has to their data and how the business is doing I think it's easier to make that case curious at what stage companies like cycle is that when um so there's often one or two or maybe three Engineers on the team so yeah it was definitely further along in the company's life cycle that I had hoped right it it definitely um it took some convincing but there...