Three finance teams, and what actually changed
Software claims are cheap. These are the specific numbers each team could point at six months after switching, alongside the problem they were trying to solve in the first place.
Northwind Labs
B2B software - Series B, 180 people, 3 entities
Priya Raghavan - VP Finance
- Days to close the month
- 11 to 4
- Analyst time saved monthly
- 22 hrs
- Entities on one ledger
- 3
“We used to spend the first two weeks of every month rebuilding the same numbers. Now the close runs itself and the team spends that fortnight on the decisions the numbers were for.”
The challenge
Northwind had grown into three legal entities across two currencies, but the month-end close still ran through a shared spreadsheet and four separate banking portals. Two analysts spent the first half of every month reconciling, and the numbers the board saw were already three weeks old by the time they landed.
What they changed
The team connected all nine accounts, both card programmes and their accounting ledger in an afternoon, then rebuilt their close as a checklist inside Finex with named owners and evidence attached to each entry. Approval thresholds replaced the informal rule that anything over ten thousand dollars got a message in Slack.
The outcome
The close now finishes on the fourth working day with 98% of transactions reconciled automatically. The two analysts moved onto pricing analysis and vendor consolidation, and the monthly board pack is exported rather than assembled.
Meridian Health
Healthcare services - 2,400 people, 6 entities
Daniel Osei - Group Financial Controller
- Entities consolidated
- 6
- Invoice match rate
- 98%
- Annual spend under policy
- $410M
“Six entities used to mean six versions of the truth. Finex gave our auditors a single trail and gave me a consolidated position I can defend in the room, without a week of preparation.”
The challenge
Six regional entities each ran their own approval conventions and their own purchase order process. Group consolidation was a quarterly exercise that took eleven days, and every audit cycle began with a scramble to reassemble supporting documents that lived in individual inboxes.
What they changed
Meridian standardised approval chains by amount and cost centre across all six entities, moved purchase order matching into Finex, and switched on SSO with role-based access so that clinical, procurement and finance staff each saw only what their role required. The audit trail became the system of record rather than a reconstruction.
The outcome
Consolidation is now continuous instead of quarterly, and the last audit closed without a single open evidence request. Invoice matching runs at 98%, and the exceptions that remain are genuine ones that a person needs to look at.
Lumen Robotics
Hardware and robotics - Series A, 45 people
Sofia Marquez - Co-founder and COO
- Runway visibility
- 19 mo
- Faster vendor payments
- 41%
- Finance tools consolidated
- 5 to 1
“Our cash moves in lumps because our components do. Seeing thirteen weeks ahead changed how we time supplier orders, and it is the honest reason we did not need to raise a bridge round.”
The challenge
Hardware cash flow is lumpy: a single component order could consume a fifth of the bank balance, and the team was tracking commitments across a spreadsheet, a card dashboard, an invoicing tool and two bank logins. Twice they nearly placed an order that would have breached their own cash floor.
What they changed
Lumen put every committed inflow and outflow into the 13-week view, set a hard cash floor with alerts routed to Slack, and gave engineering leads their own cards with limits tied to project budgets. Supplier terms were renegotiated once they could evidence a consistent payment record.
The outcome
Runway visibility went from a monthly guess to a rolling nineteen months, vendor payments run 41% faster, and four separate tools were retired. The team timed their last two component orders against forecast inflows rather than against nerve.
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