How Mesh Payments Is Helping Finance Teams Automate Corporate Spend Management (Interview with CFO Anna King)

Opening and Audience Check

Nathan Latka

00:00Can you guys hear me okay?

Anna King

00:01>> Yeah.

Mesh Payments Mission and Overview

Nathan Latka

00:02Great. 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 wanna allow finance organizations to control the spend and boost their productivity.

Anna King

00:20>> Do you have your printer? Here it is. Oh, no. You just hit this little thing right there. Go for it.

Nathan Latka

00:25Great. Okay.

Serving Large Global Companies

Nathan Latka

00:30So we help some of the world's largest global companies control their spend.

00:37So,

The Macroeconomic Case for Automation

Nathan Latka

00:40as you're well aware, the current macroeconomic environment has really forced finance teams to to really focus on reducing cost 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 wanted to poll the

Audience Poll: Month-End Close Duration

Nathan Latka

01:18audience. How many people spend more than, or less than ten days on their month end close process? Okay.

01:27Less than 20? Does anybody know? And more than 20. So typically companies spend, you know, between ten to twenty days on their month end closed 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,

02:01helping with the strategy of the company. So, that's my goal today, to encourage you to go back to your finance teams and think about how you can automate.

Productivity Killers in Finance

Nathan Latka

02:13So, 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 the production team or operations, right, in order to bill your customers. You have to pull data from the CRM system to calculate commissions for the month. And so, finding all these

02:40different 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, 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

03:10as much as that, creating a process which reduces the friction within the overall organization is really critical.

The Rise of the CFO Tech Stack

Nathan Latka

03:20So, yeah, I was talking to Ray earlier. So many companies have been started and successful in helping the R and 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, that have been founded and created to help the finance organization. So, how do you make

How to Decide Where to Automate

Nathan Latka

03:50this 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 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're trying to accomplish? Obviously, you want to automate, but

04:18maybe 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.

Starting Simple and Scaling Automation

Nathan Latka

04:34I 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

05:02to your existing systems. Make sure that ERP and that AR system can connect, and 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

A Real-World Automation Example

Nathan Latka

05:33manipulations, 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? Right? I couldn't give him that answer until five, ten days later. Right? Until we did that whole process.

05:56So, what I did is I first, I made sure we had buy in from the R and 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

06:22was 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 going to end up. So, he no longer had to wait until the tenth of the month. He

06:44knew the revenue for that month by the end of the month. So, just an example of things that you, the finance team can do to help automate and reduce the time it takes to close.

Shifting Time to High-Value Strategic Work

Nathan Latka

06:57I really like this chart because it shows the time that most finance teams spend 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, pulling data from different sources,

07:25but 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, 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

07:52wants to spend more time 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.

08:19So, 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, 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

Q and A: Skills and Engineering Resources

Nathan Latka

08:49at 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.

09:05So, 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 and D, with the sales, really becoming a partner, instead of just spending most of their time working on month end. Any questions?

Anna King

09:33>> Yes? So, do you want to go first, maybe? Okay. So, there's a lot of systems building that's that's required to wire up the different pieces of the tech stack and modernize your Yep. Your structure. What do you think the ideal skill set is for a finance professional making 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?

Nathan Latka

10:04Yeah. 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 a partner

10:31with your R and D. Hopefully the company has already thought through, but we know a lot of companies, you know, 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 and D, sometimes with the BI team, to get some of this data point. But again, I think it's easy to make that pitch to the executive leadership team, right? It's

10:57really easy to agree to, I know R and D resources are very expensive and hard to come by. But when you see the outcome, and when you 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.

Anna King

11:37>> Yeah.

Practical Tools Finance Teams Can Use Now

Nathan Latka

11:42It was definitely further along in the company's life cycle than I had hoped. Right? It it it definitely, it took some convincing. But there were things that I could do in the meantime, right? And, you know, that I think was a very unique situation. Again, like I said, every company is different. But now, with all the different BI tools, a lot of this, the finance team can do on their own. So, a lot of this, like

12:08connecting your ERP to Power BI, for example, NetSuite to Power BI, some of these things, using Power Pivot, I know there are a lot of tools out there, implementing a vendor that connects to your ERP, those things don't necessarily require a development resource, and you can do right away. And so, think you have to include that as part of your evaluation process. Right? How much resources do we need? What's that implementation look like? How long will

12:36it take? How much will it cost? Those are all data points that you want to use to build out your plan of automation.

Anna King

12:47>> Anyone else?

Closing and Contact Information

Anna King

12:50>> Anna, how can people reach out to you and follow-up with you if they'd like?

Nathan Latka

12:53Yeah, absolutely. Can go to our website, meshpayments.com. You can email me directly, Anna. King at meshpayments. I'm happy to speak with anyone about what we do at mesh and how I've automated in the past.

Anna King

13:08>> Okay. Thank you so much.

Nathan Latka

13:10Thank you. Really appreciate it.