Christian Villere’s Post

How can you measure COMPLEXITY in the Office of the CFO? (Part 2 of a multi-part series) In my first post on this series (link in comments) I described how the number of ERP transactions that my finance team has to manage has grown on average 45% a year since 2020, a much faster pace of growth than the headcount on the team (shoutout to my team Tipalti- you are the best!) This post is about how we can keep up with that complexity over time and a large part of the solution is automation. In the chart shows % of Transactions: 🟢 Green: those that post to our ERP in a fully automated fashion 🟡 Yellow: those that are partially automated and 🔴 Red: those that have no automation This is built off of real data by categorizing the transaction types into one of those three categories and taking into account when we brought in tools or changed our processes to automate these activities over time. Here are a few examples:   🍳 Not surprising as the CFO of Tipalti, we eat our own cooking! We use Tipalti AP Automation and Payment execution tool for all of our Accounts payable globally. 🧾 In late 2021 we began using Tipalti PO for Purchase order management.  Again, these entities are automatically posted.  It’s hard to see the bump here on the chart - it’s not a huge volume relative to other transaction types - but its amazing for visibility and ensuring accruals are accurate. 📲 With the launch of our Tipalti Expenses platform in 2023, we now pay employee reimbursements automatically through the Tipalti platform with the entries syncing to our ERP.  Although these transactions are not typically high dollar, they are very high frequency so the impact is large when moving from manual processes to automated ones.  ⬆️ At the same time, in 2023 and into 2024 we tackled a big project which related to our Billing (AR, invoicing and collections in our product).  This was high volume and high complexity, but also very high impact. 🏦 In 2024 we also added a few of our banks into direct integrations for transaction reconciliation, with more automation here on our priority list for 2025.  This is a very interesting space in the office of the CFO and I think the innovation here is yet to be fully realized.   In summary, what this data shows us is that we moved from 20% of our processes being fully automated to more than 60% of our processes in a few years.  And although our overall Transaction complexity grew on average 45% YoY, this automation transition allowed my finance team to keep up with the accelerated growth and complexity. Putting some data around our growth on these levers has been insightul! PS – if you are a finance leader and want to share tips on what automation tools and processes are working for your teams I would love to get a brainstorm going.  Drop me a note in the comments! - 📈 Hi, I'm Sarah, CFO at Tipalti 🔔 Connecting with other Finance leaders is a passion of mine.  Follow me here: Sarah Spoja