CFO stack experiment #1 - Month close tool

giki control tower

Good part of last 18 months at my previous role was spent working with business finance leaders in helping them run and improve core activities like reporting, RCA, inventory optimisations, competitor tracking etc and one of the key takeways for me was CFOs office had undergone a sea change in their roles and responsibilities from gatekeepers of accounts and information to more strategic ops however the tech stack for them hadn't evolved at all.

Siloed information

even basic reporting for a multi channel commerce company would take team of people working 3/4 days a week to repoting T-7 day numbers. Most finance teams were still working on clunky ERPs that don't talk to business systems and vice versa

Most information is spread out acorss multiple systems e.g COGS would in ERP, revenue would be in channelwise OMS, inventory would be in WMS. Building a unified data is pretty hard considering not every channel allows you to do things and ERPs are hard to run integraions with.

I came out to build for this team and in our customer discovery calls along with my co-founder Rahul Raushan was that IF month close happens on time, it means most activities happened on time and well. If you can solve month close management, you can help finance teams in a very meaningful way.

What is month close?

Imagine an engineering team running its sprint, bunch of tasks with ETAs and details and a daily stand up to track progress and a final closure with release to product. It's the same but for finance team members who have tasks assigned to them with details, eta and books closing is the final release to production.

What did we learn from discovery?

1. Most finance teams manage their task, checkists on google sheets and overtime each member has their own version of tasks and statuses. Weekly sync happens to exchange information by which time lot of stress is already created. Why cant we do daily standups?
2. Reviews and approvals happen over email or in-person and supporting files and data are spread across emails, slack, drive etc. Lack of version control and auditable trail of documents leads to frequent misses.
3. By nature of the processes, most talks are colalbarative with inputs and data coming from multiple teams. All the collaboration and follow-ups happen across platform and leads to frequent misses.
4. Audits are critical activity for finance teams and abiliuty to quickly access files and links related to a task saves time and stress. Today that doesn't happen. Email & drive searches. Multiply this by entity and months of operation, its massive unorganised set of files. Organizing them is also pretty hard task
5. Reconciliation sits at the core of month close and each ERP impplementtion has 100s of sub ledgers. Multiply that by entities it becomes a very hard problem to ensure every single sub-ledger across all entities for every month are fuly reconciled with supporting documents and clear approval by reviewers. No single view of pending reconciliation and which accounts need attention?

what does v0 solve for?

The first part of what we build is "Jira for finance team", which is a purpose built software to track, collaborate and document your month close process.

1. Digital checklist in one place for all entities and all months. Throw away your google sheets and bring them all in to one place. Work on multiple process and entities all at the same time.
2. Keep all information, collabation in one platform instead of juggleing email, slack, whatsapp and drives.
3. Document vault which automatically indexes all your files and links across all month tasks and make it easy to browse (much like a drive) instead of finding in emails scattered. All of this so you can be audit ready always.
4. Full audit trail on change of any ledger entries, statuses etc
5. Integrated ERP sync tool that will automatically track each ledger balances and tell you which ones need reconciliation. Tasks can be closed only when balances match. Instead of manually typing in your reconciled values, simply #giki-$task_id and we will read it. That way its much less work and your docs stay living.
6. When all this is done, you can simply ask finance/accounting questions to giki and we will tell you what we can from our ERP data. No data is evert sent to LLMs or training pruposes

Quick demo of what we are experimenting with now.

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