Driving Growth Through the Accounts Payable Workflow

Welcome back to CFO Weekly, where we're talking with financial leaders about how to build efficiency in their teams, create time for strategy, and ultimately get results, with your host, Megan Weis. Let's jump right in.

Megan Weis: Today, my guest is Sarah Dickens Spoja. Sarah joined Tipalti in 2018 as CFO. In this role, she is responsible for global finance, global accounting in the legal organization at Tipalti, in addition to related areas like fundraising, investor relations, and Tipalti's financial infrastructure to scale globally.

Prior to Tipalti, Sarah was a director at KKR Capstone, the portfolio operations arm of the private equity firm KKR, where she was a director at the firm and worked with portfolio companies in the financial services, technology, and retail sectors, including First Data Corporation, a global merchant processor in the B2B payment space. Prior to joining KKR, Sarah worked at Bain & Company in Boston and Sydney. She holds a BA from Williams College in both mathematics and economics, and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Sarah, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Sarah Dickens Spoja: Thanks, Megan, I'm really excited to be here.

Megan: Today, we're going to be learning about you and your journey, but we'll also get to learn about your current organization, Tipalti, which is bringing style and efficiency to business with their end-to-end payables automation. I'm really looking forward to learning more about that and you. Let's get started.

Sarah: Great.

Megan: First, let's start with you, if you could just tell us about your career and how it is you got to where you are today?

Sarah: Thanks so much for the question. I took a little bit of a different route into the CFO role, which may resonate with some of the listeners for this podcast. I came to the CFO role via a more of a consulting in private equity background than a focus in a finance career. If I start way back about 20 years ago when I was finishing up undergrad, I was looking for my first real job. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but what I knew I loved doing was just working on new and challenging problems and then just loved learning new things.

I heard about this career path to go into management consulting, and it will allow me to keep learning new skills and to work with really talented peers. It just felt like a great opportunity. I ended up at Bain & Company and stayed for about four years, and worked across all sorts of industries across all sorts of geographies. It really just broadened my experience. Then after I attended business school at Stanford, I found myself in a similar juncture. I had summered at one of the large tech companies, but I really wasn't sure if that was going to be my thing.

I really enjoyed this idea of getting into private equity, but also getting into the portfolio operations side of private equity and getting to work with the portfolio companies. I ended up at KKR of the firm and getting to work, again, on a diverse set of problems, challenges, I would be doing marketing stuff one day and maybe M&A the next day, working with the manager teams of our portfolio companies on various sets of initiatives. It really was taking that consulting background and putting it on steroids because now, I was really embedded in these companies and working on really tactical things.

I spent eight years there at KKR and really enjoyed my time, and spent a lot of time on payments in fintech. Ultimately, decided at one point in my career that I wanted to move from this consulting and portfolio operations type of role, even though I was really embedded in these companies to choose one company to ultimately dedicate myself to that and to watch it grow and be part of the growth. That was around the time when I started talking to the founder of Tipalti, Chen Amit, about the CFO role.

There's just a lot of great things that were coming together for me around it being in the payment space, it being a CFO role which naturally has the ability to touch in a lot of different areas because pulling together budgets and plans and fundraising Hangouts means you need to be a jack-of-all-trades at some respects. It just was a really good fit for me at the time of where I was in my career, and ultimately, has been a really exciting time for the last four years here as I've been CFO at Tipalti.

Megan: What an amazing career you've had and an educational background. Management consulting is an exciting place to start a career because you do get to touch on a lot of different things. As you look back, are there stories or turning points in your career where you can really point to and say, "That's what made a difference and got me to where I am today"?

Sarah: It's a really interesting question. I think the thing that makes my 20-year career across consulting, private equity, now at Tipalti, and a little break for graduate school in the middle there is actually probably the lack of moves, not the moves themselves. It's something I joke about with some of my friends from business school, in particular, being now almost 12 years out from that experience and having had really only two jobs since then, is actually pretty rare.

I think for me, and I've given this feedback and advice to some of the people that I mentor that are thinking about their career is, for me, what has really been true is that at these companies I've been at for quite a while, I ended up getting to work on really exciting projects. I get to take on more leadership responsibility or more accountability for outcomes. I get to do it because people know me well and because they get to know me over time.

My career has accelerated not because I've jumped around but because I've stayed and built really deep and trusting relationships with people so that they want to champion my career and growth and allowed me to do things that, at times, put me over your skis, if you will, I think is the saying, but has also let me grow and have really interesting career opportunities throughout my career. The CFO role at Tipalti has been even a clear example of that because when I joined Tipalti, the company was only 100 people.

The CFO job at an 100-person company is very different than the CFO job at an 1,000-person company which is where we are today just almost three and a half years later. For me, every 6 to 12 months, I find that if I were to write my job description, my job description has changed dramatically. Sometimes, it's full functions that are being changed underneath me, sometimes it's more of a gradual change.

It's really allowed me to have a diverse set of experiences even while staying in the same companies. This act of maybe replanting yourself every 6 to 12 months and being mindful around what you need to do differently for this next phase of growth for your company has been really dynamic for me. It's been really interesting to think about how much growth I've had even while staying put if you will.

Megan: That's really interesting perspective. Tipalti, how old is Tipalti?

Sarah: Tipalti was started in 2010. I guess we're 12. We're in our pre-teens, I guess, as a company. [chuckles] I would say the business itself really started growing in 2015, 2016 as we started getting our first real large customer. We've probably been more well-known in the last five years of the company's history. We started 12 years ago with our founder and CEO who's still founder and CEO, Chen Amit. He was employee number one. He jokes that the second year of the company he hired one person, so there was employee number two. The company doubled in size.

It's been around for a while. One of the things in this space that we're in is it does take a long time to build the type of product and feature functionality that really makes it robust in this space. I'm happy to talk more about the company as well. Also, it takes time to build banking partnerships and money transmission licenses and establish yourself with all the regulators. It does take quite a while. What you see in this space is actually a handful of companies that have been around for 10, 15, 20 years, really being the technology here because of just frankly, it's a more complicated space, so it does take more time to fully build a product to address the needs.

Megan: Let's talk about what it is that Tipalti does. Being in the accounting field, I've heard of it. Let's dive into a little detail.

Sarah: Yes, yes, sounds great. Tipalti, in a nutshell, is the leading payables automation software solution for mid-market companies. We provide a software platform to help finance teams, manage and automate all of their traditional account payables spend and/or their global partner payments. We automate and streamline this activity across 190 countries and 120 different currencies. We really can handle anything a company could need as far as being able to help them with their global supplier onboarding to tax and compliance across all these countries.

We collect invoices through invoice capture, and we digitize those invoices, so there's no more manual paperwork being done by accounting professionals. We are the platform browse the approvals using machine learning. Again, there's a digitization of a process that otherwise might happen over email or fax or some less than ideal platform. Then on the back-end, we process those payments through a licensed money transmitter. We reconcile both the payments and the invoice data back into a company's accounting system so their ERP and that's the full range of the product. We also have a procurement module, so it helps with budgeting the purchasing process and ensuring that there's controls over procurement so that you don't like, from a finance team perspective, those of us that have been in the space can definitely point to times in which we receive an invoice. We weren't even aware that someone in the company decided to purchase a product or a service.

There's also procurement modules in place that help to put more controls around the buying process and behavior internally to a company, but really it's about taking a lot of manual processes, which is what accounts payable has been traditionally forever, and making them into an automated process that digitizes all factors of the process and reduces risks and frankly, saves a lot of time for folks that are in the accounting department so that they can focus their time on tasks that are much more value-added and that they might enjoy more than processing manual invoices.

Megan: Yes. I know for years, people were almost afraid of automation that it was going to take away jobs, but I would argue that it does the stuff that nobody really wants to do anyway. The stuff that takes the longest and nobody really loves doing.

Sarah: Yes. When I speak to my peers that are prospects or customers of ours, the thing that always resonates with me is that a modern tech stack for the office of the CFO is going to be about helping your team have a better work experience and essentially, elevating some roles that historically may have been really manual and very, maybe even mundane and you put a tool in place that allows that work to be done in 20% of the time. Then you allow people to go work on the things that they want to be spending time on that are more value-added, that are more strategic in nature that they might enjoy doing more.

I think that a modern tech stack for any leader, making sure that your team has the tools to be successful at their job is a crucial part of leadership. I see in the office of CFO that frankly, this department has lagged behind a lot of the other departments and automating their technology stack and at Tipalti, this is what we like to do.

Megan: Just curious, does it integrate with any ERP?

Sarah: It does, yes. We have a number of really strong partnerships with accounting software providers. NetSuite, as an example, is a really strong partner of ours, Intacct and Sage, Microsoft, QuickBooks, et cetera. We have integrations currently with about 50 different ERPs, which it's a fragmented space, but that's quite a number. We do find new ones all the time, or we have customers who have new ones. We are able to build out custom integrations and template integrations for new ones as they come about, but with the set of 50 or so that we have today, it covers off probably 80-90% of the market.

Megan: How does your product differ from the competitions?

Sarah: Yes. We really focus on the mid-market and we define that as being employee size is about 100 employees or more. That's for our traditional accounts payable process. In that space, we are really focused on making sure that the finance team is saving time, reducing risk, and having an improved experience as they process all of the accounts payable. What that means is that we really focus our efforts on things like supplier onboarding and making sure vendors can actually do some of the work for the accounting teams and onboarding into the platform, providing their banking information.

It's the approvals routing, it's the reconciliation to the ERP, and then, it's this global network of payment rails that include 190 countries in 120 currencies. I would say the biggest differentiation points between us and "the competition" is around our ability to do cross-border and global very, very well, and very differentiated in that regard. It's in our integrations with the ERP and on the software that we use to do that integration. It's the combination of having both procurement and invoice processing and payment and AP all on the same platform so you really have like a one-stop-shop for that.

That's really some of the areas that are focused on, but the thing I really think about in this space is the vast majority of companies haven't yet automated their AP. They might have some tools that they're using that automates through one sliver of the process, but the end to end automation is really only done by a handful of companies today, and Tipalti is a leader in that space. For a lot of companies, this isn't a place they have yet invested time to implement.

Most of the time when we're in conversations to sell the product, we're spending time actually educating these finance leaders over how much a product like Tipalti can save them time, reduce risk, and frankly, make their employees on their team much happier with their roles. It's a small cost to pay, to do all of that because frankly, it saves you tons of time and tons of money by implementing these types of automation services.

Megan: Again, I'm just curious, but what percentage of the mid-market do you think is automated and AP?

Sarah: I think right now, and there's been a bunch of research done by some of the external research reports, looking at the handful of companies like Tipalti that do this, but in the mid-market, I'm seeing reports that say less than 5% of companies-

Megan: Wow.

Sarah: -have automated their full AP.

Megan: I would've thought it would've been a lot higher than that. I'm surprised to find that it's that low.

Sarah: Yes. It would match with a lot of the data we see because so many of our prospects and customers that sign with us, we know that those deals are not competitive. Oftentimes, customers say that they couldn't find someone that could satisfy their requirements other than Tipalti which is always a nice thing for someone to say, but it's a space that's really emerging. I like to think about like where accounts payable and business payables are broadly is almost where E-commerce was 10 years ago.

If you think about the growth as people were digitizing payments in, and E-commerce was becoming more and more of these e-commerce platforms becoming more and more of an obvious starting point, that's where I see B2B payments going. You still have almost 70% of B2B payments are made up with a paper check. You can't digitize or automate a paper check. It has to be received by someone. It has to be sent by someone. It has to be imported into their, put into their banking system.

Whereas electronification of payments saves all this time and money and makes cross border seamless. There's still so much room for automation and payments, electronification of payments in the B2B space and we're really just touching the first ending of this growth.

Megan: Yes. Sounds like it. As you look back in the last four years with Tipalti, what are your proudest achievements since joining that company?

Sarah: Yes, it's been really rewarding to be part of the growth at Tipalti over the last four years and to see so many changes as we've grown from about 100 employees when I joined to 250 the next year and then continued growth from there, I get a lot of energy out of being a power user of our own product. It's really special and important for companies to use their own tools, to use their own product.

For me, I really enjoy becoming that voice of the customer, my team becoming the voice of the customer [unintelligible 00:17:38] Tipalti because we end up using every product, and most of the time, we Guinea pig all of the product enhancements and features before they're out for the general public. I really like being an early user of our own products. I love talking to our customers and prospects about it. I love building my peer network of CFOs, both because I always gain something from one those conversations in some aspect, not even about digitizing payments, but just about questions that we all have about, "How can we be better at this role"?

I find that's been a really fun thing to do, but for me, getting to know the product so well and being that voice for the customer, for the product internally has been a really fun thing and something I didn't expect I would enjoy as much when I decided to join a company as CFO that sells to CFOs. It was a exciting thing that I hadn't thought very much about before joining.

Megan: Yes, that's really cool. I'm not sure many CFOs can say that. You previously spent eight years as a senior operating executive where you were known for asking tough questions. How has that experience helped you in your first CFO role here at Tipalti?

Sarah: Yes. I think being an operating partner at a private equity firm is a very challenging job. A lot of respect to my colleagues that are still at my prior employer, but also with the folks that do private equity Ops across a lot of firms. The thing is, is that you take that role and you come in and you are expected to deliver on results, but you're delivering on results by partnering with management team and working with them on what are their goals, what do they need to achieve them, and how can you help be an accelerator around those projects or initiatives, and you can help moving along and help add bandwidth and resources to those projects.

When you approach it that way, it can be a really fun, exciting job. You can build great relationships there. At the same time, it's not lost on people that if you're working in a private equity firm, like your peers are on the board of that company and there is this controlled environment in private equity in particular because they're typically majority control situations. This experience really helped me to think about how to work cross-functionally with lots of different people that had lots of different goals. I spent a lot of time with groups like finance and marketing and operations and product in the companies I worked with. Getting to see a diverse set of challenges, because each of those departments, goals, and outcomes are different, it also gave me a lot of experience in breaking down very challenging, large problems into very manageable, discrete type of analysis or tasks that you could gain alignment around those things. Kind of, "How do you frame the problem? How do you think about managing the various work streams to get something done?"

I think a lot of ways, CFOs have to almost do that on a daily basis. It's not as obvious as in a consulting firm or a POPS role, where you're really taking on that kind of project management layer, and breaking down problems into smaller, discrete tasks. In a lot of ways, CFOs function by needing to manage through others, needing to understand broadly, "How the business is performing, where are we spending money? What are the key KPIs in every department? How do I know if things are going well? How do I know if I can increase my investment in that area or cut costs in that area"?

I think that my experience from consulting and from private operations gave me that broader lens. I like to think that I try to bring that with me into the CFO role as I spend time, frankly, with all of my peers, and we're all working together to make the company more successful.

Megan: I think that's a good segue to the next question on the evolution of the CFO. On LinkedIn, you said that the age of the modern CFO is here. How do you think that the role of the CFO has evolved and what does the modern CFO look like?

Sarah: Absolutely. I really think that the CFO tech stack, what are you using as your technology solutions to help you manage the business and drive insights, is incredibly important. I do think that the strongest CFOs will focus on building out that tech stack based on whatever stage of growth they're in or industry that they're in. That is going to be suitable to ensure that they have that solid access to data and they've also automated as much of the manual tasks as possible.

I think a lot of the task with CFO are really table stakes, it's like you obviously have to be able to close the books on time, you need to be consistent with reporting, you need to be five steps ahead on what the capital needs are for the business from a fundraising perspective. Those are all, frankly, table stakes, but when I talk about the modern CFO, and as we talked about it internally at Tipalti because it's those modern CFOs that are the best champions for our product, and who we'd like to try to reach [unintelligible 00:22:42].

It could just be the [unintelligible 00:22:44] control, or the modern VP of Finance, doesn't have to be a CFO, but that person who's really thinking about, "How do I use software to be a force multiplier for my organization and get to better outcomes and be able to retain my team"? Those are the folks who I see excelling. The CFO job has become more and more complicated. If you're not using the best available tools to really organize the department and organize the data correctly, you're going to miss things. I think that that's really important for CFOs to think about, is that tech stack and investing in it.

Megan: Let's just delve into some details around the benefits of automating payables. Can you put some numbers to it? How much faster can a company close or how much time can be saved?

Sarah: There's tons of different ways of thinking about payables automation, I'm happy to discuss those. I can also broaden that to just general automation. Certainly, when we work with our customers, we ask them after implementation, after they've been on Tipalti for a couple of months. We'll ask them, "Okay, well, how's the process going? Where are you seeing time-saving and the like?" When someone goes from a purely manual AP process to a process using Tipalti, you can get closed down, or at least, the AP portion of closed down almost 80% of the way.

An AP is typically the longest item in the closed cycle. At Tipalti, we close AP by day two, two, and a half or so. That's really a fast process. We wouldn't be there if we weren't using Tipalti, obviously, as part of our process. There's a ton of time savings involved, and just getting to the data faster, but also, just then you don't have people on your team working on this for the first two weeks of the month if you had a longer close process.

I think that the broader benefits of automation, and this could be true if you have AR Automation or even if you're with a best-in-class Cloud ERP tool, or you're using automation and equity management or an FP&A budgeting tools. There's a whole host of it. We use a really great product for our closed management that saves us a ton of time. The tech stack is obviously broader than Tipalti, but there's a lot of commonalities when people think about, "Here's my tech stack and I'm going to really look at all the pieces of it and make sure that all the big elements of it I've automated".

It comes down to really reducing time, bringing together data in the right ways to make better-informed decisions. That's a big part of it. Tipalti adds a flavor of that around cash management as an example, and cash forecasting, on the AP side, which it's a byproduct of having a good automated AP process, is that you can look ahead 30 days in the future and see exactly when all your invoices are due, and so have an understanding on cash management and cash forecasting.

That's a byproduct, that data is a byproduct of a tooling system that is itself valuable just by saving time on the manual financial operations. Obviously, the data byproduct of it is also valuable. I think you see that in a lot of areas that as you start to put tools in place to automate and streamline the various activities in the CFO world, you'll find that you can then bring the data together in a much more seamless fashion and you can then get to better insights.

Ultimately, the outcome for the CFO office is to have the best insights that they can about how business is performing, and what levers you can pull to improve business performance. I think that's the ultimate byproduct out of all of this investment in the CFO tech stack, is getting to that place in time.

Megan: You touched on this a bit with maybe your automation a month-end close process. As a technology company, what tools other than to Tipalti, are you guys using that's helping to make your lives easier?

Sarah: We use NetSuite for our ERP and really likes the product, we use a product called FloQast for close management, we have an equity management tool, we have a tax management tool. We obviously have Tipalti for all of our AP and also we use it for FX and for hedging and for a ton of other activities, cash management, and a few other activities as well and procurement. We use our embedded procurement tool inside Tipalti for all of our procurement activities. That's probably the course at now. We've got a couple.

No company's perfect, and there's two areas that we're investing this year. One is around our FP&A budgeting tools to revamp that and stack that up to the scale that we need to be at now and the others around our revenue automation tools. There's definitely areas every year that we look at the tech stack, and we either say, "Are we missing a tool for this need, or have we grown out of or are growing out of the tool we have in place?" That's the case for those two, and those are our priorities for 2022, to continue to modernize our tech stack.

Megan: Other than those two areas, as you look out into the future, what are the biggest challenges that you're seeing right now on the horizon for you or maybe CFOs in general?

Sarah: Just on technology, or just generally?

Megan: I guess, just generally.

Sarah: I think that any CFO that's not taking a good hard look right now of their capital position, and where if they need to fundraise, how they think about fundraising, either equity or debt, and if they are profitable, how to think about shoring that up and cutting costs where they might be able to, given the interest rate and inflation environments that are being seen, those are really important things, and it's frankly, the stuff that probably keeps most CFOs up at night.

We did a big fundraising at the end of 2021, and so we're very well-capitalized. I see us as being in a position of strength to invest during this time of perhaps market challenge, but that's really important for every company, to really be thinking about where they're going to fundraise next from if they need it. If I take my CFO, peer groups, that list servers that I'm on, I would say that this type of question is one of the ones that is asked a lot, which is, "What are people thinking about fundraising and how are they handling the disruptions from the public equities markets and interest rates"?

Megan: Speaking of that, what is your strategy for raising funds at Tipalti?

Sarah: Generally, our strategy in the last few rounds has been to raise money before we need it. I think it's a very common fundraising strategy. By doing so, we've been able to be really selective with which investors and types of funds that we work with so that we can assure that from our vision and strategy perspective, there's alignment with them, and we're with our stage of growth.

That's been something that's important to the broader group of those of us at Tipalti who've been part of our most recent fundraising. In today's environment, the conversation that is on lots of finance leaders' mind is, if they were expecting to raise in 2022, which again, we raised in 2021 earlier, so we're not expecting to do equity fundraising in 2022 but if you were, the market's very different right now, and they may need to change their strategy or think about alternative types of structures in order to be successful now. You saw the same thing happening in early 2020 with COVID where equity markets in particular, and even debt markets really closed up for a few months. For private company fund-raising, people went and had to get bridge loans or other things like that from their bridge rounds, from their current investors, just because there was this unexpected uncertainty that happened.

People were caught off-guard on it, obviously, because no one really expected COVID to happen. I think you're seeing a lot more of that now but I think a lot of people did raise in 2021 and shored that up expecting there to be something in 2022. Hopefully, folks are finding that they are in a better space right now.

Megan: Lastly, what advice do you have for CFOs who are looking to drive strategic value within their organization?

Sarah: I think that for me, at the end of the day, especially, we talked about this modern CFO approach, and the modern CFO isn't just doing the stuff, there's table stakes, it's working with peers, it's getting the best data, it's automating systems, that you have the right processes in place. It's therefore being able to really access those insights that help you drive revenue, reduce costs, invest better in the business. I really do think that that starts from the tools that you're using in your tech stack, I'm reiterating the points from before.

If you're not choosing the right tools, if you're not choosing the tools that are going to scale with your business, not just for today but for two to three years from now, then you're going to be at a place where you're having a headache to resolve again in 12-18 months. When I talk to my peers about how they're thinking about certain tool implementations, it's always around, "Okay, well, what are the features and functionality that I need now but also, I have more of a crystal ball than everyone else does because I can see the 12 months from now or 18 months from now?"

I want to make sure that the product that I'm choosing now is going to work in the future. If I know that we're just a US-based company but we're about to start opening entities in Canada or we're going to start letting people work from wherever they want to in a remote-work environment, and we're going not have expenses in all these foreign countries, I now need to be having a solution that's going to allow me to manage a much more global vendor base.

That's an example of what we see, at Tipalti where we have that need to manage global vendor bases is becoming much more of a need, that companies are experiencing earlier in their life cycle because there's just generally a world with less borders. It's interesting that happens a lot more. I guess my advice for CFOs is really to focus on their tech stack and don't hold back funding for their own tech stack [chuckles] and only give funding to the other departments.

Then also, think very carefully about when and which tools are the right ones to implement at the right time. Ideally, only do it once, or only do it once every five or seven years, but really choose a tool that's going to last for a long time so that once you get through that implementation, you can move on and do other things and not have to come back and look at that decision for a while.

Megan: What a great answer. Sarah, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Sarah: Thank you so much, Megan, for having me.

Megan: I really enjoyed speaking with you and hearing about your experiences. I wish you and Tipalti all the best. Sounds like you're both doing great things. To all of our listeners, please tune in next week, and until then, take care.

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