How Hertility Manages 63 Software Subscriptions With a Lean Finance Team

Hertility is a fast-growing women's health company. Its finance team is small and efficient, and that shapes everything: with few junior people in accounting, the mundane work of paying suppliers, reconciling invoices, and managing software has to be automated rather than staffed.

When Clare Gething Lewis joined the team, Cledara was already in place, managing Hertility's 63 software subscriptions. She picked it up and handled the monthly close on it without inheriting anyone's spreadsheet or institutional memory. Cledara is software subscription management built for finance, and Hertility's story is less about a dramatic switch than about what a lean team can do when the system is built for the job.

For Hertility, automation is not an efficiency nicety; it is how a small team keeps up. Clare is direct about why it matters.

“As a compact Finance Team in a high pressure startup environment, so we have to automate mundane tasks as much as possible, such as paying suppliers and managing subscriptions.”

The small tasks are where the time goes. Adding a new vendor contact used to mean opening Xero and waiting for a sync before anything could move. Now Clare creates the contact inside Cledara and it is there at once.

“I was able to just create the contact rather than having to go into Xero and wait for it to sync, which could have taken an hour or so. That's been really time-saving.”

– Clare Gething Lewis, Hertility

Employee reimbursements used to sit in a separate expense tool, and that tool billed per user profile whether or not the person was active. To avoid paying for people who were not submitting anything, Clare's team had to keep pruning the user list by hand, month after month.

Cledara handles reimbursements inside the same platform Hertility already uses to manage its software, and includes the first 10 users at no cost, billing only for active submitters beyond that. The manual pruning stopped, and the first bill was correct: of 16 people, only the 6 beyond the free ten were charged.

“The reimbursements, since they're essentially a free add-on and you only pay for people above 10 users, have been a total game-changer. That has saved us loads of time.” 

The gain here was not a better expense tool. It was one fewer tool to manage, with expenses folded into the system finance already uses for software.

On Cledara, the people who use the software own its budget. Budget holders set their own soft and hard limits, build them into the forecast, and account for going over or under.

“The budget holders basically have full control; they can set soft and hard budgets for the applications they're using, which puts the onus on them.”

A hard budget does more than flag an overspend after it has happened. If a subscription's price rises past the cap, the payment does not go through at all.

“If we've got a hard budget and that software has gone up in price, then the payment will bounce and won't go through.”

That is control at the point of payment, not a report after the money has left. And because the context lives with the owners rather than in one person's head, a finance lead joining Hertility does not have to reconstruct who decided what. The accountability is already distributed.

Clare joined with Cledara already in place and made it her own quickly: software and expenses in one platform, budgets owned by the people who set them, and support to lean on when the month closes.

“It's absolutely essential to have something like this.”

For a lean finance team, that is the case for managing software in a system built for finance: keeping 63 subscriptions, their invoices, and their owners in order, before any of it gets out of hand.