When I joined a technology company that was trying to scale the business to the next level, I was the first finance analyst hired to work on strategic initiatives. I quickly realized that this was a company that had great leadership, great technology but very rudimentary financial operations functions. Due to the founder’s resource management method of investing heavily on engineering talent, they left many headcount gaps in finance and accounting so the team had to wear many hats. I was tasked with validating complex vendor invoices to assist the 0.5 person accounts payable team. This was boring and mundane as my passion lies in excel modeling and financial systems implementations.
As I am inherently a high-achiever who wants to shine in all my assignments, I make the most of it by learning how the network infrastructure services were selected, contracted, provisioned and budgeted by the technical operations team. I spoke to engineers to understand how the services were tracked internally, read contracts to understand how services were calculated, absorb all the knowledge I could to understand these services from a business impact point of view.
In the process I discovered an untapped opportunity for saving money. I noted that by performing a 3-point validation on every single order, I was able to pick up billing errors that resulted in significant vendor credit. It was not uncommon for me to uncover tens of thousands of dollars in errors in a single invoice. Along with my peers (who were all part-time invoice validators), I created a tracker called “money saved list” so that we can make a game out of who “saved the most money for the company”. We motivated ourselves to complete this mundane task by pursuing the excitement of staying on top of our game and saving the company money. I sent the tracker to our executives every quarter and we received praise and commendations. This was a great way for us to gain positive attention as a non-technical person in a technology organization.
Fast forward one year, I was given the opportunity to build a self-sustaining team of invoice and operations analyst that was unique in that we were not part of accounts payable, nor a part of traditional accounting and finance but delivering financial and business analysis work for the business and most importantly was self-sustaining. My team also provided vendor and contract management services to the technical operations team as well as month-end close reports and bottoms-up budgets on the costs we manage, crucial in assisting the core accounting and finance in their roles and responsibilities.
Over 5 years, my team grew from 1.5 employees to 5 employees and thrived through multiple mergers and acquisitions un-impacted by layoffs. I built a team that was “stronger than the sum of its parts” and provides value added business services to the company. Even after I moved onto another role, I still keep in touch with my old team and last time I spoke to the manager, I was told that the annual vendor credit recoveries exceeded $ 1 million, which is more than 2x the resourcing cost of the team.
The lesson I have learnt from this experience is to never undermine the importance of even the most mundane business task in potentially becoming a crucial enabler in a business. With a little bit of luck, I manage to transform accounts payable, repurpose existing resources and created business processes that continues saving the business money.