Case Study
Embracing financial processes to power a new future In a company led by inventors, how do you introduce processes that will feed
growth and innovation, not stifle them?
@tidyint
Nicki Letts Nicki is a copywriter and brand storyteller who helps businesses create content that attracts the customers they really want - and keeps them. From tech to craft breweries, she’s magicked up powerful, punchy, polished words for all sorts of companies who want to stand apart from the masses.
That was the challenge faced by the finance team at Fulcrum3D. This article is
F
ulcrum3D is a classic startup story. Like many great businesses, the Australian tech company was founded by people who are passionate about providing a solution to a problem. Back in 2011, the problem was how to measure and provide reliable data for renewable resources, such as wind and solar. To solve it, a team of renewable energy specialists based in Sydney came together to invent technologies that could provide precise data to predict electrical output from wind and solar farms. Fast forward to 2021 and Fulcrum3D’s products and solutions are being used by the renewable energy sector worldwide. In fact, its flagship Sodar wind monitoring system is one of only five remote sensing instruments globally considered to provide bankable wind data by leading independent consultants. As the business has grown, so too has the breadth of products and services they provide. That’s the thing about inventors - they never stop innovating. Finance manager, Stephanie Schreiber, explained that
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Fulcrum3D designs and manufactures their own products, deploys and commissions on-site systems, and operates its own data monitoring and analytics service. “This business is more complicated than any business I’ve worked at before, in terms of accounting.”
“The time lags we were experiencing in the finance department were really holding us back,” she recalls.
However, amongst all this complexity, there was a lack of formal processes - something that threatened to hold the company back from its growth potential.
This was especially problematic when it came to revenue recognition.
“In a short time, we’d moved from a small company with minimal formalised systems to a mediumsized company with processes,” she explains. “The amount of componentry and instruments we were building with was growing, and we needed tighter systems to keep tabs on it all. “At the same time, the amount of people in the business was increasing and we needed to ensure everyone had access to accurate information.” For the finance team especially, there was a third important factor: time.
“In particular, we needed to reduce the time lag between processing spend and income in the system and running reports.”
“In a simple business, you build something and get paid 100 percent of the money in seven days, and that revenue is recognised in the accounts. “In our business, it’s much more complex. Clients typically pay over a series of milestones so our revenue recognition isn’t necessarily instantaneous.” Sorting through the project spend and invoicing, Stephanie would spend one day a week on manual revenue recognition. “And I was always months behind,” she says. The game-changer was TidyEnterprise, a project, inventory and workflow management software that
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