Eric has been an entrepreneur for 25 years both in Silicon Valley and Europe. Now you will find him heads down building tru.ID, to reimagine mobile authentication by offering a possession factor API that's secure and frictionless.
They have customers of all sorts of verticals focusing on B2C or B2E, from FinTech companies to dating apps to delivery companies, and they are a fully remote company, with people in the UK, Spain, Greece, Austria, India, Mexico, Singapore and Dubai.
We spoke with Eric about how they deal with SaaS subscriptions to get a glimpse of what it's like to use Cledara in a fully remote company from day one.
“When we started tru.ID, Cledara was actually the first thing I registered for. I had seen SaaS chaos in other companies, and this ensured that I could prevent it at tru.id. It was a no-brainer for me.”
“When you're small and growing, you don't really look at credit card charges, invoices and other finance things,” Eric says.
“You don't pay as much attention unless you are actually a finance guy, or you start hiring one. And that comes probably one year, two years down the road, when you already have a lengthy backlog of items waiting for someone to spend their time cleaning it up.”
How Cledara helped
No finance person should spend time chasing invoices and looking at charges from a year ago.
With Cledara, tru.ID automates invoice capture, reconciliation and bookkeeping. So finances are always up to date, without lifting a finger.
“Now everything is managed and centralized, without much manpower. I think when you're small, it’s the way to go.”
“You need simplicity when you’re small,” Eric tells us. “I really didn't want to spend time managing software subscriptions.”
He continues, “I’ve seen the movie before where you start using your personal credit card or your business card. And then one year from now it expires and then all the critical subscriptions you have will be lost because your card expires.”
Eric says that “being able to keep that level of simplicity is definitely one of the reasons why we wanted somebody else to manage subscriptions for us.”
And that’s where Cledara came in.
“Before Cledara, software was kind of unmanaged until someone forced you to manage it. It was just all over the place.”
“In other words, you needed to chase every individual who actually used a different card to pay for something. And then you needed to hire someone to figure it all out.”
The result? Unmanaged SaaS and a lot of time spent trying to tidy it up. And worst-case scenario, an additional headcount to manage all the manual tasks., not really the place you want to be when you're at an early stage and need to focus on building your product.
And Eric knows this.
“Actually, the best thing about Cledara is that it works so well on its own that I don't need to regularly log in. So I set it up and then I forget about it.”
“That way we can focus our time where we can deliver value to our customer instead of spending time on the operational side.”
