How Quantico Streamlines Financial Operations for Partners with Cledara

Oliver is a FinOps lead for Quantico, where he works as an outsourced finance hire for startups. He discusses his role in assisting startups between seed and series B/C stages in setting up their finance processes for fast growth.

“The things that make the most significant difference for businesses as they scale are built on having processes set up in a robust way. That's why we started the FinOps Approach, driven by having good processes in the first place and using tools like Cledara. That's what we think makes a really successful early-stage business.”

Oliver traditionally gave prepaid cards to all employees to give them the freedom to sign up for the products they need. While this works at a very early stage, Oliver shared that as companies scale past seed stage, problems with this process start to appear.

“You might have a few data engineers, and they know what everyone is working on and the tools they're using together. But when you start to grow, you've set up processes for small teams, suddenly everyone wants to use their version of software that they like most, so you end up with lots of duplicate software.”

Previously, with prepaid cards, invoice collection and reconciliation was painfully manual. With limited hours with each partner, any time wasted on financial admin tasks meant he wasn't spending time where it was really needed.

Part of Oliver's role is helping his partners through funding rounds. However, once the funding hits, it can quickly be wasted on duplicate and unnecessary software tools and seats.

"Software spend grows each month, and you need to be in the headspace of questioning spend decisions, of who should have access to a particular software platform, because it's costing us, say, $5k a month”