How Rora Streamlines Financial Operations with Cledara
We spoke with Oliver Wimhurst, FinOps Lead at Rora, about how he streamlines financial operations by automating invoice capture, preventing duplicate software purchases, and providing full visibility of expenses.
In this story
Oliver is a FinOps lead for Rora, 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.”
Better than Using Prepaid Cards Alone
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.”
How Cledara helped
With Cledara's built-in approvals flow and virtual cards, Oliver is able to give his partners a more scalable and secure way to buy and manage software vs. the previous pre-paid card system.
Also, Cledara lets Oliver maintain the trust he has between him and his partners, which is a high priority with his role being outsourced.
And by consolidating software spending into one place in Cledara, Oliver and his partners now have full visibility and control over what is their 2nd biggest and fastest-growing expense.
Invoice Capture Streamlines Accounting and Frees Up Time
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.
How Cledara helped
Now, thanks to Cledara, Oliver has automated invoice capture and reconciliation, saving 10+ hours/month, plus making accounting, reporting, and admin a lot easier so he can focus on valuable tasks"
“Having it all in one place makes it easy to check because Cledara pushes spending through, and you can categorize it correctly. That makes my job a lot easier and it means that I'm freeing up time to go and do other work on other parts of the business that might be a bit more complicated.”
Investing in the Right Places
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”
How Cledara helped
Oliver says that money could be reinvested in something more important and that many businesses struggle with having checks and balances and budgeting control. And that's one place where Cledara has helped.
“Once businesses secure VC funding, they need to think carefully about how they make the funds work for the business as a whole. Using Cledara gives you the opportunity to invest in the right things, and eliminate any waste.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Tymit connected Cledara to its NetSuite accounting system and mapped the full reconciliation workflow in under 30 minutes. Native integration means the monthly close runs automatically rather than as a manual export and re-entry exercise.
It depends on volume and integrations, but the saving can be substantial. Tymit reduced its monthly software reconciliation from close to a full working day on a generic corporate card tool to between 15 and 30 minutes on Cledara, even while managing 102 subscriptions.
Spend management is organised around the transaction: what was spent, on which card, by whom, across the whole business. Software subscription management is organised around the subscription itself, tracking each tool's renewal, invoice, and owner. They answer different questions, so a company often needs the second even when it already has the first.
Shared corporate cards let several people spend behind one card, so a missing invoice or an unclear renewal points to a whole department rather than a person. Software subscription management changes the unit you manage from the card to the subscription, and assigns each subscription a single named owner, so finance always knows who is responsible for a given tool.
Pleo and Cledara are built for different jobs, so the question is less which is better and more which job you need done. Pleo is a strong tool for managing company spend and expenses. Cledara is built to manage software subscriptions specifically, organised around the subscription and its owner rather than around the transaction. Finance teams whose main problem is managing software, not tracking expenses, tend to choose Cledara for that reason.
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