IOU’s consultant James Douglas has worked in finance for over 20 years, both as a Big 4 audit partner and as a finance executive at high growth FinTech companies.  He has been working with IOU to assist them with scaling their finance function as they experience a period of high growth in the business.

“When I began to work with IOU Financial, my focus was to help optimize and scale their finance processes to match their growth ambitions. It's a public company that’s been in existence for over a decade and has been experiencing rapid growth since the pandemic, with loan originations to small businesses on pace to grow up to 60% over 2021.”

James asked himself all the big picture finance questions when he considered where to start and one of the areas immediately identified was the need to standardize and automate the process by which bills were paid and, more importantly, the need to bring enhanced visibility to internal stakeholders as to where and how the company was spending money as the company grows its operations.“

Spend was my first area of focus, because, after all, we can do all the forecasting and analysis we want as a company, but if you don’t have the tools in place to manage your cash flow effectively,  you can't scale the company in the long run.” 

‘Sometimes’ doesn’t cut it

The AP process at IOU was highly manual with disparate processes across its different locations, and stakeholders lacked good visibility into trends on spend with major vendors.  The process was ripe for change, but what IOU didn’t need was a massive ERP solution that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What it did need was a solution that was simple to implement, easy to use and brought visibility to the approval and payment process and insight into how the company was spending money. And that solution was Glean AI.

Glean AI for the big win

“Glean AI has been a big win for us,” says James. “The onboarding was straightforward and took less than two days. The customer support team was there for us through the whole process, as we got all of our vendor information into the system, set up the payment and approval flows, and connected Glean to our general ledger software.”

“The system is super intuitive and absolutely fit for purpose.  The integration with Sage Intacct makes for seamless transfers of data and no need for dual entry anywhere.  Glean does exactly what we need it to do and has breathed a new enthusiasm for spend management into the company.”

At IOU, the entire team has experienced the benefits of Glean AI. Not only was Glean easy to implement, but the ease of use, the intuitive interface, and the ability to access data in one dashboard led to high adoption rates among the company in a very short period of time.   “Everyone has been singing its praises. I constantly hear from our management team and vendor owners who say, wow, this is so easy, thank you!  Invoices make so much more sense when you can see what you spent the month before and the overall trend and no one has to dig around for this information anymore, they love having it at their fingertips.” Change is always hard, and have something as easy to use as Glean made change management and driving adoption so much easier.

“With Glean AI, our AP is no longer a black box and this has made people both engaged and accountable.”

Saving time is saving money

 “Now, our AP process couldn’t be simpler,” says James.  “I can open Glean AI, see what has and hasn't been approved, and then schedule payments for when I want them to happen. This feature has helped enable the implementation of cash management protocols to help further propel the business forward. Once payments are scheduled, there is complete trust that the invoice will get paid on time, which means it is one less thing for me to have to worry about.”

“The bottom line is that we used to have an accountant spend 4-5 hours a day every day of the week managing our AP with no real insight into what we were spending.  Now, with Glean AI, we spend two to three hours each week. That really says it all!”

To book your demo or to learn more about the Glean AI solution, contact us at hello@glean.ai