The finance tool stack from Series B to IPO

Your company has recently closed Series B funding, and you know you’ve outgrown your partnership with your small bookkeeping firm. You’ve finally reached a point of growth where you need to hire a finance team and start building out your fintech stack. Although this is an exciting stage of growth for companies, it can also be daunting – the fintech market is full of solutions. Which are the best-in-class tools that will grow with your company as it expands from a Series B startup to its IPO?

Here are the best solutions in every category to support your company’s needs as you grow.

Accounts Receivable (AR) Solution: Stripe or Zone Advanced Billing

Digital payments are a vastly growing industry with a projected additional $23.45 million in the next four years. Stripe boasts an impressive 90% of all US adults having used their cloud-based payment processing systems at some point. And, in 2019, Stripe supported businesses in recovering over 40% of unpaid invoices. The software offers options for invoice creation, setting up one-time or recurring payments, as well as the ability to program trials, coupons, and add-ons. If you’re using NetSuite as your ERP, consider Zone Advanced Billing which was built to handle complex billing scenarios and built entirely in NetSuite.

Account Payable (AP) Solution: Routable

While a successful vendor management plan is multi-dimensional, reliable payment practices can make or break those relationships. Changing stakeholders, PDF vs. print invoices, ACH payment transactions data: each of these elements of the AP cycle can slow down the process, leading to missed deadlines and impacting terms. As a business grows, manual practices contribute to delays in AP cycles. For easy B2B payments, choose Routable. They provide customizable stakeholder communications and seamless vendor onboarding including privacy of sensitive account information that contractors enjoy all while integrating with the accounting software you already use, including Xero, QuickBooks, and NetSuite.

Spend Management Platform: Expensify

Tedious expense reports are painful for your staff as well as your accounting team. Upgrading spend management software simplifies this process for both sides and proactively prevents the misuse of corporate funds. Expensify provides integrations for a landscape of corporate spending from receipt tracking—Uber and theParkingSpot—to travel expenses—TravelPerk and Pana and supports importing of GL codes.

Revenue Recognition Solution: Tesorio

Standardizing, understanding, and analyzing your company's cash flow and revenue is a necessity for growth—as well as a requirement for GAAP compliance. While companies remain in manual cash flow management, they are susceptible to human error and cumbersome analytics. Tesorio uses AI to automatically identify cash flow strategies to increase AR and make up-to-date creative decisions rather than remain mired by repetitive tasks.

HR and Payroll Solutions: Gusto and Sequoia

Onboarding with a new company can be both exciting and tiresome. Due to company growth, an employee that was hired six months ago may have undergone a completely different onboarding process than the newest hire. It’s no surprise that 24% of turnover happens in the first 45 days of employment. However, businesses with standardized onboarding processes experience 54% greater new employee performance. SMB companies will enjoy Gusto with remote on-boarding capabilities and employees benefit from Gusto Wallet for personal finance management. For medium to enterprise sized companies, turn to Sequoia for HR planning and rewards programs analytics.

Banking Partners: Silicon Valley Bank and Mercury Bank

Traditional financial institutions may not be the best solution for your business needs. With set card limits and the need to navigate a remote workforce, turning to cloud based banking offers more solutions that meet you where you do business. For a great overall experience, turn to Silicon Valley Bank, a go-to for start-up innovators in tech and life science industries for the last 35 years. SMBs should check out Mercury. They support both small and high-yield businesses, providing access to checking accounts, debit cards, and international wire transfers.

Financial Close Management (FCM) Software: FloQast

Also known as accounting close management, this kind of software improves accuracy for month-end financial reporting. Rather than relying on error prone manual reconciliation input methods, FCM software provides process and task management as well as bridges the gap between ERP and Excel so that sensitive financial data does not have to be stored in the cloud. FloQast’s accounting workflow automation enables CFOs to run leaner departments while empowering accounting managers to focus more on strategy than being bogged down in manual data entry.

Tax Software: Avalara

Paying a CPA for tax filing can come with a big price tag. In addition, most CPA’s have expertise limited to a small number of jurisdictions. Using tax software keeps the process in-house and tends to be more cost effective. Avalara, which has over 20,000 clients, is a tax automation software that includes over 700 integrations and is vital to ensuring that tax and VAT are applied correctly. Users can choose to use the entire suite or work a la carte for specific needs.

Reporting Tools: Looker or Tableau

Reporting and analytics are valuable tools for a myriad of business needs. From sales teams that need to demonstrate product efficacy to business development looking to expand into new revenue streams. Looker is business intelligence software that helps both SMBs and post-IPO companies integrate all data points to encourage interdepartmental business solutions. Not everyone is a data analyst and that’s why Tableau is a great choice for new-to-data companies. Tableau relies on their mission to put the user first and not only offer a leading BI platform, but also make data analytics part of every business aspect. 

Invoice Factoring Solution: BlueVine

It is inevitable that some invoices go unpaid for long periods of time creating low cash flow; a critical issue, especially for SMBs. One option available is invoice factoring where a percentage of qualifying invoices can be funded up front while a business waits for the invoice to be paid. Recognized as the fastest low-cost factoring option, BlueVine supports quick online applications with high limits and low weekly rates.

Invoice Reconciliation Solution: OpenEnvoy

Reconciliation introduces delays in payment cycles, not to intentionally add duress to vendor relationships, but to ensure accuracy and documentation for potential audits. OpenEvoy anticipates that a quarter of all invoices in most industries are incorrect at time of submission. Using their software, they guarantee a return on ROI by removing manual data entry and review that is prone to human error.

Electronic Data Interchange Platform (EDI): Stedi or SPS Commerce

Sharing sensitive business data with partners and potential investors is not as simple as attaching a document to an email. Security, encryption, speed—these factors play a big part in the data exchanges of business operators today. While the options for EDI are plentiful, Stedi is a newer platform for B2B transaction processes focusing on serverless-first approach. Stedi, while seeking to create a standardized formatting for EDI, can also integrate with legacy platforms. SPS Commerce is another vendor to consider, whose EDI and vendor enablement solution makes it easy for retailers, suppliers, and 3PLs to maximize their productivity and automate their business processes.

Software contract review: Tropic

Concerned about costs related to fintech? There's support for that, too. Tropic provides software contract review software helping your business control spending on the tools that drive it. Whatever your barriers may be in upgrading your finance software to meet the moment, trust that these industry-leading solutions will get you where you want to be.

Best all-in-one solution ERP System: NetSuite

If you find yourself adding too many additional applications to your current system, then that is probably a sign you should consider upgrading to an all in one ERP system to increase your system’s core functionality and limit application sprawl. NetSuite, founded in 1998, is a cloud-based ERP with a significant number of integration options. As a leader of the industry, they continue to foster successful business practices for over 24,000 customers worldwide.

NetSuite enables their customers’ continued success. Here are some recent stats on NetSuite clients in just March of this year:

• 12 successful IPOs

• 11 more upcoming IPOs filed

• $17.24 billion in funding raised by VCs for NetSuite customers

In addition to being your ERP solution, NetSuite can also provide the following solutions:

• Accounts receivable

• Spend management

• Revenue recognition

• Recurring billing

• HR and payroll

• Tax software

• Reporting, budgeting and planning tools