Finance Digitalization
Overview
Stayland is a rapidly growing real estate holding company with a highly complex operational structure. In the Finance department, we manage a team consisting of four accountants, a Treasury Manager, an Accounts Payable specialist, and a Head of Finance. At that time, the holding comprised over 12 companies and more than 40 bank accounts, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Chase.
My contribution
➝ Stakeholder Needs Analysis ➝ Problem Conceptualization ➝ Research of Potential Solutions ➝ Solution Implementation
The team
➝ Finance Department ➝ IT Department ➝ Business
Year
2022
Process
The project began with a business need to reduce the accounting lead time across the group of companies. Each of the four accountants was responsible for a specific group within the holding, divided by both activity type (short-term rental, luxury short-term rental, co-living, hostel) and location (USA or Europe). The key performance indicator (KPI) for tracking progress was the average time to close the books for each group of companies, which initially stood at approximately 30 days. This meant accountants were recording income and expenses with a one-month delay. The goal was to move towards real-time accounting, where transactions are recorded as soon as they enter the bank account.
Pain Points
Through stakeholder interviews, we identified the following pain points:
- Accountants: The accounting process was challenging because the operations team (cleaning, procurement, treasury) made expenses without proper categorization due to missing information.
- Treasury: Treasury management struggled to keep track of payments due to the high volume of daily transactions caused by the rapid growth of the holding.
- Operations: Reporting expenses made with the company card was cumbersome, requiring them to make purchases and then manually send emails with relevant details (property name, invoice, reason for the expense, etc.).
- Business: Without complete accounting, it was impossible to track critical business metrics, making it difficult to secure further funding for property acquisitions.
Problem Conceptualization
After understanding the various pain points, we formulated the core problem:
"Difficulty in categorizing expenses and income due to a lack of information in a high-volume daily operation."
Solutions Chosen
We then set out to research potential solutions to reduce the KPI we had defined:
- Payhawk: A business expense management platform that allows us to create approval workflows, categorize expenses with AI, and issue cards with tailored questionnaires for each operations team. This enabled near real-time expense categorization. Payhawk also integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks Online, Stayland’s ERP.
- Embat: A Treasury Management platform that automates recurring payments and pre-categorizes them, ensuring certain payments are already categorized in advance.
- QuickBooks Online: While QuickBooks was already in use at Stayland, not all modules were correctly configured. We took the time to deep-dive into the tool and define more efficient ways to leverage its capabilities.
Outcome
The implementation of the various platforms took approximately 45 days. After refining the workflows and adjusting the processes with the different stakeholders, we observed the following results:
- 50 days: Accounting lag reduced to 15 days
- 65 days: Accounting lag reduced to approximately 7 days
- 90 days: Accounting lag reduced to 2-3 days
We can confidently state that after integrating the platforms, training the teams, and refining workflows, the business was satisfied with the results, as reflected in the KPI we monitored throughout the project.