How To Increase 20% in Cashflow

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Transcript

Hello, everyone. This is Victor with Varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Spend Advantage podcast. Today we're excited to have Finfloh, uh, with us. Uh, Amartya Singh, who is the CEO and co-founder. FinFlow is a platform that automates accounts receivable and credit decisions effortlessly. Welcome to the show, Maria. 

U1

Thanks a lot, Victor. Thanks for having me. 1.1s

U2

Yeah. Super excited to, uh, see how you guys can help companies with, uh, with their accounts receivable. Um, if you don't mind, maybe you can give the audience a little bit, uh, sort of the company background and your background. 

U1

Sure. Thanks, Victor. Um, I mean, from a background perspective, I'm a second time founder. Uh, my first startup was in the payment space. Uh, had a great journey over there, built out, um, a great taking in Android work with some great firms. And, uh, we, we got acquired by a listed payments entity a couple of years ago. Um, post that been working on this particular, uh, the new startup of ours. Uh, from a background perspective, I am an MBA and a computer science engineer. Have always loved how technologies can impact businesses. Uh, across my decade of building and scaling tech businesses. I've really seen the evolution of technology across cloud data. AIML blockchain has been really phenomenal to be a part of this term. The entire, uh, tech juggernaut. Um, and currently, you know, post the acquisition, uh, we wanted to do something again from scratch, build a great startup around, uh, uh, how can we, you know, uh, transform the ways finance teams work, right? And, uh, we always believe that, uh, from out of all the softwares that works, that is used in the B2B SaaS ecosystem by CBOs, CTOs, CRO, CMOs, CFO tech ecosystem has been one of the most evolving space, uh, over the last 2 or 3 years, when you were when one refers to the CFO tech space, the thing that comes to your mind are ERPs, uh, primarily, but, uh, more and more firms have started, uh. You know, have started looking beyond ERP and trying to solve the problem statement, which cannot be solved by these, uh, the ERPs. And that was something that drove us to build a tech or finance teams. And one of the most important problem statements that actually caught our attention is accounts receivable. Um, I, I have a great personal connect with accounts receivable from my background. I have worked with firms where, you know, we I used to work on the sales side as well as on the finance side. And then at points of time, we used to even have $200,000, you know, stuck in accounts receivable for greater than 180 days. And this is in spite of having one of the most complicated and great softwares in the company. So we saw I saw personally that, you know, uh, even though the intent was there to solve the accounts receivable problem, uh, but the tech was not supporting the C, the ERP did not have the necessary support for handling these, uh, problem statements. The sales and finance teams were not, uh, you know, at the same terms in solving the problems. In short, huge problems in account receivable is what I saw in my personal experience. And that drove me towards, you know, considering why don't why don't we actually go to solve the accounts receivable? Uh, right. Accounts receivable is a historically, uh, process that has always existed. But what has changed right now is, you know, there are two, three aspects. One is the importance of cash flows. Post 2020, uh, firms are really focused on the cash flows and majorly on receivables, since it's one of the most uncertain elements. Secondly, uh, CFOs are now one of the biggest purchasers of tech software. And third is, as firms have started growing ERP and tech, uh, CRM technology and other technologies have really expanding, creating more problems of synchronization. And so that's why, you know, we focused on accounts receivable and this was the best time to build for us. So here we are looking to solving and transforming the entire accounts receivable and credit decisions piece for finance teams. 

U2

Yeah, I know. First of all, uh, we love repeating founders. Uh, first time, you know, you, uh, didn't didn't you learn enough? And, you know, you want to go the second time and know anybody that's built business know how difficult it is. So, uh, there's a lot we can learn. Learn from you for sure. And, you know, first of all, we see the same thing. I think, um, you know, in the SaaS world, you know, obviously there's been a lot of focus on, you know, when you talk about B2B software, there's obviously, you know, the sales force, the sales, right, sales stack, and then you have marketing stack and you have, you know, DevOps, right. And those type of things because those are typically revenue generating. And but I think in the last couple of years we've seen a lot of growth in procurement tech in fintech. And you know, I think most of the, you know, companies, executives, um, you know, want to grow revenue, they want to increase top line, they want to reduce bottom line. But when you start talking about accounting terms like accounts receivable, accounts payable, they just think it's, you know, obviously account you know, finance terms and let the CFO deal with it. And but I think they don't they may or may not recognize as some of these things, when not done well or efficiently, can really impact their revenue, impact their margins. And that is something that, you know, would love to talk to you about, um, today. So let's get started with what are some of the typical areas that you think companies have challenges with accounts receivable? Can you give maybe 2 or 3 kind of concrete examples? 2.5s

U1

Uh, right. So I think, um, so, I mean, before I go into problems, maybe one way to do it is let's just summarize what accounts receivable process entails. Right? If you look at accounts receivable, it's simply put as the process of getting your money back from customers. Uh, it starts from an invoice creation or invoice automation piece where you are understanding how your invoices should be matching a quote and matching with an order. How do you send the invoices to your customers? How do you handle disputes which are raised by customers? Uh, how do you, once the invoice moves into credit period, what kind of collection follow ups that are done? And finally, once a payment comes in, how do you match it with invoices and post it into your ERP? So that's typically the process in accounts receivable. Now historically receivable processes are you know, have been have been their uh, have been mostly being handled manually or with limited support from ERPs. Uh, as we started working with firms and, you know, we spoke with a lot of finance, uh, team members, with CFOs. What we saw is that a very interesting point has happened, right. As firms start growing, uh, beyond a five, ten, 20, 30, 50, 100, $200 million, the complexity in issues and receivables also increase in scale and complexity with this. Right? What I mean by that is a firm grows in revenue, which also means that a firm grows in the customer count and invoice count. And also it also means that the billing type starts moving from a prepaid to postpaid, right. What happens is there's a lot more dependency on, uh, you know, getting your money back from the customers and which is primarily accounts receivable. So as firms grow from the, you know, the revenue and customer count, typically they go from a QuickBooks to a NetSuite or to a dynamics. And even further down the line, SAP, which is in line with their processes becoming more and more complicated. Hence they need more complicated softwares. And what we have seen is accounts receivable is one such space which actually increases in complexity and needs are typically a good. So all right. So from a problem perspective, um, typically uh, you know from accounts receivable there are two major kinds of problems I told about the processes. In terms of the problems, there are two major things. One is the operational problem. If you look at the invoice to cash process flow, it has four major problems. The first problem is are the ERP and CRM are not syncing working together. Uh, the point that you mentioned was a very interesting point. You know, firms are using a Salesforce as a CRM and a NetSuite as an ERP. Both the softwares do not talk to each other. It creates multiple issues. One issue is, you know, uh, invoices are not matching with their codes. And, uh, with the orders, this is one problem that we saw in one. Uh. Company that was you working in the marketing automation space where the invoices are either leading to an under invoicing, where it is lesser in terms of pricing and code with regards to the, you know, the code or it is higher, it creates a revenue loss or too many disputes. So the invoices are not synced properly between KR and ERP. That's one problem. The second problem are the collection flows. Most of the collection strategy and flows are currently manual. In today's date it is completely haphazard. It depends. When you don't get money, you directly call up the customer to get the payment. There is no proper customization. Automated workflows around collections. Number three is the lack of collaboration between the sales and finance teams as well as, you know, with customers. Not a very clear cut, workflow driven mechanism to solve disputes and issues leading to delayed payments. And finally, the invoice payment reconciliation, where you know you're getting in the money and you are spending 2 to 3 man hours in a day or 2 to 3 days in a month, uh, you know, these firms are spending in trying to reconcile too much. Um, you know, manpower efficiency is going down in these manual processes. Right? So that is the operational angle of the problem. And there is obviously a strategic angle, which is credit decisions. Uh, in a two liner, if I have to explain it, a higher high credit risk key, uh, customer, which means a customer who is not paying you on time and is constantly paying one, 21, 80 days is a high risk customer. For that specific customer, the credit period should not be a 30 day standard. It should be 15 days so that you can push the customer to make the payment. You can make the pricing much, much, uh, you know, the pricing should be not as good as a customer who is actually paying you on time. So you can define your credit contract terms. You can, uh, derive your onboarding process flows based on the high risk, based on the risk level of the customer. So that is a strategic problem that we are trying to solve. And obviously the operational side is the manual process that we try to solve. In a nutshell, you know, that's the problem statement that we are trying to. 

U2

Yeah I love everything you just said. I want to break that down. Um, you know, a little bit I mean, I want the executives and people listening to the podcast to really. Understand kind of the the golden nugget as you just mentioned. I mean, every company spent so much money and time to, you know, generate sales, right? Generate leads and go through the effort of the sales cycle. They battle just to win the deal when the customer. Right. And and you put all of that and you spend all that time you put in the sales force, meaning you spend a lot of time just to get that customer right in the first place. And then turns out you're charging them too little, meaning, you know, incorrectly. Maybe you're collecting less than what you're, you know, supposed to charge them. There's just so many discrepancies between, you know, sales and then obviously finance tools. And so, you know, I just want kind of even the, the sales leadership who may not know about finance to understand that, hey, you put all that effort and money to generate the lead and close the deal. And yet your company may not even be collecting the right amount of money from those customers, or they're they're not able to collect it because the customer is not paying. And so all of those things have such big companies impact. But we're going to come back to that later on in a couple more, uh, you know, questions there. But I love that topic because, um, really highlights kind of this, this spin advantage that we, we talk about. So the next question, Maria, is, um, how does a or or accounts receivable impact kind of the cash flow of a business and maybe obviously cash flow important. That seems obvious, but I'd love for you to kind of give some thoughts. 1.4s

U1

Yeah. I mean, I mean, that's a very fundamental questions that, uh, you know, we typically, uh, you know, always ask our CFO clients and our SVP finances, right. And director finances. How what does what does actually cash flow mean to you? And I mean, trust me, the answers that we get are so interesting and so varied. I mean, there is obviously a base concept that cash flows are important, but why are the cash flows important and why are the cash flows not in sync? The answers are really, really brilliant and very interesting. Right? So I mean, cash flows at the end of the day are the lifeline of the business. Uh, but it's also, you know, one of the most important and uncertain elements of the cash flow management piece is predictability on payments or, you know, the dependency on customers to pay. Right. Um, you have uncertain receivables, uncertainty in customer payments. It ultimately boils down to means, uh, you know, uncertainty in your cash flows and you do not know how to plan it. Right? You have operational expenses which are happening on a day to day basis on a month to month basis. Uh, you have that money, you can plan it out much better. And if you do not have the money, you will have to take a working capital loan from a bank. It all means an opportunity cost, right? The the later you get the money, the higher. I mean, the later you get to get the money, the more cash flow uncertainty. And, you know, uh, control comes, the lesser control comes in, which means that you have to borrow in from the market. It all boils down to an opportunity cost that you're paying for the delayed payments, right? The sooner the firm gets paid this, the better they can invest. Right? And typically for all these kind of, uh, you know, accounts receivable, one of the important benchmark in this finance teams is aging, for example. Right. What is my aging of invoices? What is my aging of customers? And more importantly, what is my aging across business units, right. Or across geographies? I am an MNC and I'm working in a North America. I'm working in Latin America and Europe. I'm working to Asia. How does my aging reflect across different, uh, you know, geographies and another aspect is a it's outstanding. It's outstanding, uh, you know, basically means what is the average number of days to collect sales. Right. So these two measures are typically gold standards that we have seen in terms of calculating how strong is that are. And if a firm have their aging and DSO properly benchmark properly captured, the teams are aligning the sales team and aligned the collection teams are aligned. Typically it means, you know, cash flows are in control, are in a much better shape. So that's how I've seen, you know, in our experience, how CFOs typically prioritize these are metrics for the cash flows. 1s

U2

Yeah. Uh, okay. I can talk to you for hours. I mean, some of these things, you know, sound so simple, it's like, why is cash flow important? Uh, you need cash to pay for things like pay for everything. So it is the lifeline. And, uh. No, you're right. You know, imagine, you know, your lifeline and, you know, you you would want to have the best process, the most efficient process to, you know, have, uh, your cash flow, uh, you know, under control. Uh, so that totally makes sense. Um, you know, one of the things we talked about earlier, you kind of mentioned you obviously, you and I, uh, you know, met with a lot of customers that literally, you know, people, you know, salespeople were were obviously closing deals and Salesforce. And it's a very it's a celebration. It's great. We will close another deal. Yeah. Because the Salesforce was not talking to their ERP correctly. So actually executive executives were finding out that, you know, a lot of their, uh, collections was actually collecting the wrong amount, either charging too much and or too little from their customers. And, you know, I think sometimes it's hard for companies to, to understand that. It's like, what do you mean? Like we sold them for $1,000. Like we should get $1,000 and charge $1,000, like, why is there a discrepancy? And so, you know, why do you think the process of from sales to collection is broken? Can you kind of maybe go into it a little bit deeper on why do you see that typically happen? Um, is it just a platform not talking to each other or what more is there? 1.3s

U1

I mean, as you rightly said, Victor, I can go. I mean, we can go over and hours on this particular problem. I'm thinking of writing a white paper very soon on this because, you know, you look at the problems, right? Let's look at the fundamentally, you know, the roles perspective, like sales and receivables or collections are two aspects, major aspects of a company. Right. And you see the problems between the sales and collection process. Flow can be captured in three ways, right? One is obviously, you know, the tech side of it. The other is second is process and third is people aspect of it. Right. Let me cover the tech aspect because that's the most interesting aspect. And that's a problem that we have seen in a lot of firms. Right. Uh, an interesting point. You mentioned that, you know, a company is using a Salesforce and ERP like a NetSuite. And, you know, there is a cpq process, uh, cold process and, you know, configuration, pricing and quotation process in the CRM. And you're delivering the product or service and invoice gets created, uh, between the CRM and slash billing and the, you know, the invoicing in the, in the accounting platform or the ERP platform, there is a there are a lot of mismatch which happens. Right? Why is it happened? Because it might be a quantity level mismatch. It might be a price level mismatch. Uh, price level mismatch might happen because, you know, uh, there is a discount which has been given there is a tiered pricing which has not been accounted for. There's a milestone being missed. There are multiple ways and means for the invoices to not match with codes and maybe with the order quantity. Right. And that is one major problem, right? So if the invoices are verified properly and the CRM and the ERP are talking properly to each other, that solves a lot of issues because you are not having the cases of under invoicing, which means you are invoicing lesser than what was agreed upon in the price and quantity, which is actually a revenue loss. Or nor are you over invoicing, because if you are over invoicing, it will create a lot of customer heartburn. There will be a lot of disputes. You will have to resolve it. You will have to understand it so that invoice verification is that the cusp of the ERP, CRM, you know, synchronization and difficult becomes more deeper, right? There are billing ID issues in a CRM. Uh, Walmart has 20 to 30 billing IDs. Walmart electronics Walmart Air. Walmart. Marketing. While in an accounting software, there's a single billing ID, which is captured huge issues in terms of managing both the workflows. Further, it becomes complicated when invoices get canceled, credit notes get created. A CRM does not understand a credit note. So these are some of the major examples where we have seen firms are just not able to handle it. And they somehow have manual means of handling these problem statements. Right. So that is one major aspect of the sales and collection. The you know, how it is broken, the tech software, the softwares are not talking to each other. Second thing is the second, second problem are the processes. The processes are completely manual currently. How a uh how a sales, uh, you know, team is handling a particular client, how a collections team is handling a client, how are they handling the you know, the processes are set with regards to what kind of payment processes is done. Uh, or everything is manual, right. Uh, reach out to customer is manual or dunning is manual. In some cases the emails, you know, the invoices sending is manual. Dispute resolution is manual. Everything is manual. There are no automation, no workflows, huge issues in between the processes. Right. And the third and the most interesting aspect is people issue. Right. So fundamentally if you see sales teams are focused on closing clients and collections teams and finance teams are closed on, you know, focused on getting the receivables. There's a dependency of the finance teams, on the sales teams to actually talk to customers and get back the money, or to maybe to close out a dispute while the sales guys are more focused on the incentives. And then there is a responsibility of receivables. There's always been friction between sales and finance teams, a great software which actually can connect to CRM and ERP, can, you know, automate the entire process workflows and can build a collaboration tool within sales and finance teams can be actually a killer tool to actually ensure that, you know, the sales and collections teams are connected and accounts receivable and cash flows are much better. 3.2s

U2

Yeah. It's, um. Yeah. I mean, again, that that whole process, I, I've seen it firsthand with, you know, a lot of customers and, um, you know, so, so obviously, uh, very excited to partner with you guys to help customer solve that. Um, you know, obviously when we call a spend advantage, we look at as the competitive advantage for a customer spend. And that's what, you know, we like to talk about is getting into the numbers, getting into ROI. So I think the first half of the conversation so far has been a lot of methodologies and and challenges and, and you know, but I want you to maybe talk about, you know, some, some data points. So, you know, when you say you can, uh, reduce DSO from 90 days to 30 days, what does it mean? And how does that impact cash 

U1

flow? 3.1s Right. So I think I mean, just to give a little bit context about DSO, DSO stands for de sales. Outstanding. Uh, you know, very basically it captures what amount is pending and the total sales and it divides, multiplies it with the number of days. So it a DSO indicator of 30, 60, 91, 22 basically, you know, it means that how good is your, how good is your collections efficiency of the processes. Right. So one thing that we always target is you decrease the DSO of companies. The money will come in quicker. It has a direct impact on cash flows. So from our experience, what we have seen is that there are companies which, uh, you know, are at a higher DSO of, let's say, 100, 220 days. And there are some great companies which are having a DSO of 30, 40 days. Right. So what we typically do is that while we have the collections efficiency processes, when we have seen working with these companies, the DSO, you know, has different meaning in different industries, like in an idea, it's industries where the terms are of a particular type. Right? DSO means different from a company in the manufacturing right across our industries. The basic goal figure of a DSO is 30 to 45 days. A 45 days is a great figure to come up. 30 days is an excellent figure. What we have seen is that when we start working with companies, they start from a DSO 120, 90 and 60 and so on and so forth. Uh, what we have seen is that an average target, if you see, uh, let's say there is a company which has a DSO of 90 days and, uh, you know, we can get it to a DSO of 30 days. Typically, the cash flow impact that we are talking about for $100 million company is about 4 to $5 million. Right? That means that is the cash flow impact. That is the cash flow positive surplus that you can have in your cash flows, which means there is a lesser opportunity cost. You do not have to have to lend it from the market, and you have the money with yourself, right? So that's a huge cash flow impact because it's ultimately money that is there in your hand. So that is how we correlate the day sales outstanding into an overall cash flow impact. 2.4s Yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, these numbers were, I think, give people, uh, you know, something to think about when they listen to the podcast and say, hey, what is my DSO? And am I am I kind of meeting the industry standard or best practices? Um, so, you know, I think when you have this kind of transformational solution and technology in general, you know, there's always the question of why isn't everybody doing it right? And and the next question kind of goes into that. So obviously there's a lot of, um, I that's built into your platform, but can you kind of explain how does this because obviously companies have existing processes, they have existing people, they have existing teams. And so, you know, let's call it digital transformation. Like this is amazing. Could be amazing. But it's always a big change within an organization. How how do you see you know your solution can complement meaning help existing finance team and ah teams who who might already have the people and process in place. But you're not going to come in with a big change, right? Instead, you're helping complement. How do you complement them? 3.3s I mean, that's a great 

U2

question. So, 

U1

uh, you know, when we actually are working with firms, uh, I mean, uh, it's very important to, you know, build a platform that is actually complementing the current solution because substituting or replacing a current product is, uh, you know, is a more challenging, uh, thing to do in terms of, uh, uh, converting a number or, you know, getting into, uh, selling the product to the company. One of the best, most important things that our product, uh, what we have looked and doing is complementing the current product stack. Right. And what I mean by complementing is, hey, you're using certain softwares you are doing with certain processes. We will do it in such a way that the processes become better, but the processes which are actually working for you, the tech actually is working for you, will continue working that way. The companies are much more, uh, you know, adaptable and are ready to, you know, use that product. Right. So from that perspective, what we have seen is that, you know, when we speak with companies, uh, one is obviously a product that works with the, uh, in the current product setup and, you know, does something better. The other aspect is, you know, if a person or a human is taking a decision or doing an, uh, doing something, can we use artificial intelligence? Can we use ML? Can we use data to make that, uh, particular action much more automated, much more decisive? Uh, you know, uh, much more, uh, data driven for that particular decision to be taken. So that is our, you know, you know, roughly to put to our target in terms of what how we build that. Uh, so if you look at the process flow, right, so if you look at the invoice to cash or the credit to cash process. So we talked about two problem statements, right. One is the invoice to cash, uh, which has and you know, and invoicing automation aspect of it. The second is delivery and dispute resolution. The third is, you know, the collection follow ups. And the fourth is invoice payment record. Across all these products, the focus has been on making the product much more smarter in terms of, uh, you know, how do you automate those manual processes and how to make them take better decisions? Let me take an example. Right. One example is in the collection follow ups today's date. Also, you know, you companies typically send collection follow ups in some manual ways. And you know, understand that, you know, okay, money has not come in 3060 days. Let me call up that particular customer or let me send an email or let me do something else. Right. How can you use artificial intelligence tool to actually simulate that, uh, you know, priority item or what we call a collectors work list for that specific collector. So collector will have certain processes automated, which happens based on whether this is a risky customer or we, you know, this customer is expected to pay late. How do you automate certain processes and also how do you prioritize your, um, you know, items, focus items on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis, which accounts you should run, after which invoices you should run after? That's where artificial intelligence comes into the picture. Because number one, it automates that and automates and makes it more decisive based on the credit risk and probability of payment. Number two, it gives that particular ten different task items that the particular collectors need to focus on. That's one example of artificial intelligence that we use. The other interesting aspect is use the entire cash application right in or invoice payment record, getting your money into your bank account. You do not know which customer has paid and which invoice has paid. And that's a huge problem in terms of sellers how to know this, right? One way to do it is somebody sits down, somebody understands, hey, this bank account statement has a remark that this customer A has paid. Sometimes customer name does not come. Even if you have a customer's name, you do not know which invoices is paid. All these decisions are taken by somebody who sits, tries to understand, does a lot of guesswork, um, you know, apply some kind of methodology and just goes ahead with it. We completely changed it by automating that process to use machine learning. Um, you know, to read those, uh, bank account statements. We do OCR to read the bank account statements. We use an algorithm to match the invoices with payment. That's another application of making the productivity much more going, doing away with errors. Right. In a nutshell, how do we use ML, AI and data driven, uh, you know, analytics for sellers to take better decisions to simulate whatever decisions they are taking in a manual way without data, how can they automated use data and make it much more scalable? That's one aspect of it, the other aspect and the more interesting aspect to the credit decision piece, right. That's actually, you know, one of the biggest differentiators of our product. So what we basically are saying, hey, you have your account receivable data. If we can get you market intelligence, like we can give you DMV data, we can give you bureau scores, we can give you any same data. How can we use that data and marry it with a historical data? Use machine learning for a seller to assess the credit risk score of the buyers. So if 1000 buyers are there, they'll be able to assess and come up with a credit risk score of their buyers. And they can use that to take multiple decisions like what should be my credit terms, contract terms, pricing terms, today's date, all these decisions are taken haphazardly. Either they are driven by the sales guys who take a decision. There might be certain cut offs. There is no such, you know, intelligence that drives these, uh, decision making. That's where we bring, you know, ML in terms of credit scoring, make it much more intelligent. So on and so forth. How do you build an, um, we have something known as a chatbot, which is actually a driven which helps CFOs to, you know, act as a virtual assistant for them to understand where the receivables issues are. Right. So there are three, four elements, three major aspects. One is, uh, application of AI ML in the invoice to cash. Second is credit decisions and credit scoring. And the third is the virtual assistant. So these are some of the applications we have seen. And what is most important from our experience firms have really loved the product. You know loved how the application is there. Because in today's day, CFOs are one of the biggest levers of AI across across the board. And that's where we have seen these products having really landing and expanding within businesses. 

U2

Yeah, I love those. I love those, uh, use cases you mentioned. Um, you know, I was actually thinking of something, uh, obviously, uh, right now, you know, AI assistance or copilot, uh, are so popular, everybody's saying they're the AI copilot or whatever for X, and, you know, maybe maybe you guys are the, uh, the copilot or AI assistant for AR. I mean, I think that that is such a because I think when people talk about copilot or assistance, then it sounds more complimentary, right? You're meant to, uh, you know, kind of expand people's capabilities and make things easier for them. And so, no, I love I think every company should definitely, uh, obviously partner with you and me and, and, um, have kind of an, ah, solution in place as we kind of wrap up with, um, you know, the last couple of questions here, um, you know, typically, again, when people think about making changes in these processes, type of things, or AR, which is a very big, you know, operation, they, they, you know, are worried about, you know, kind of the time to value time to ROI and how long this thing, you know, it's going to take. Because when they think about an ERP, it takes, um, some two years to implement ERP, which is, you know, crazy, um, how fast or how quickly can customers that work with, you see ROI or impact or even the implementation? Um, you think? 2.6s

U1

Right? I mean, that's a great question. I mean, especially I mean, coming from you, I'm sure you must have seen, uh, the, you know, the most amount of insights and, uh, you know, uh, while you have been working with firms from, uh, from a inflows perspective, what we have seen is that, uh, typically, you know, uh, a lot on the ROI aspect, it depends a lot on the size of the company and what kind of, uh, you know, processes are there. What is the sales outstanding of that particular of that company? How many finance members are there? So there are three, four aspects that we typically take into account. But roughly if you see, uh, you know, for a business with a revenue of 50 to $100 million in revenue, you know, and as the company start increasing, uh, particular customers, maybe, or a 5 to 10% on a monthly or a yearly kind of a scale for this type of a company. What we have seen is that if they go ahead with our our product, typically we have seen the ROI being meted out in the in around 4 to 7 months is what we have seen in the types of go live, right? While for larger companies, for example, the ROI is slightly quicker because, you know, I mean from the perspective of overall usage. But yeah, I mean, that's where we have seen that overall impact and ROI, uh, being meted out. And interestingly, you know, we have also built out an ROI calculator, which actually is available on our portal where you can just feed in the DSO and the number of people, the finance team, the revenue. And you can quickly get the ROI impact that 

U2

you have in nice. Yeah. That's uh, no, that's a great I love ROI calculators. And again, we're just very excited to to partner with you guys. To me, spin advantage is all about how do we help companies, um, you know, really spend their money cheaper, better, faster, easier, uh, optimized. And, um, and you guys are the partner. Exactly. To do that, uh, the last question we always, um, ask our guest, Maria, is, uh, you you've done a lot. You've seen a lot especially. You've built and sold another company before. If you have to give one personal and or business advice, whatever, it might be, something that you're passionate about. What advice would that be? 2.6s

U1

You see, I think, uh, I mean, see, uh, one aspect of what I believe in today's diet is it's very important to believe in what you are doing. And and that's the most important thing, right? Uh, when, when people work on certain business problems or they're working in a job or they're working on a startup, it's very important to, you know, go all out and 100% of the problem that you're solving, and that comes from a point of confidence or a point of dedication and perseverance to what you are trying to solve. So what I believe is that it's very important to live in the present, to believe in the problem statement and going all out 100% towards solving that. And, you know, that's how it is. I mean, going for that particular problem that you're trying 

U2

to solve. Yeah. No, uh, amazing conversation, man. And, uh, yeah, super excited to, um, to work with you guys. Really appreciate you being on the show. 2s That was an amazing episode of the Spend Advantage podcast, where we show you how we can help you ten x your bottom line savings and top line growth for your business. Hope you enjoy the conversation and if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.