CASE STUDY

With Glean AI, Laika's Finance Team is Ready for Growth

Laika, a fast-growing compliance startup, has a lean finance and accounting team of one. Glean AI provides the automation and visibility their finance manager needs to scale successfully without the need to hire any additional dedicated AP personnel.

Company:
Laika

How would you describe Glean AI to a friend?:
‍Glean AI is a tool that meets all the basic accounting needs that bill.com would but also provides enhanced reporting through various dashboards and 'gleans' which allow me to easily figure out the trend in my vendor spend and pick out any irregular activity that I may want to be aware of.

ROI of using Glean AI:
It has helped Laika to call out potentially excess spend to the department leaders, but at this point, time savings versus legacy google sheets system is the biggest return on the investment.

Time consuming AP ends here.

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Finance Team of One Needs Streamlined Processes as Laika Grows

Jake Liebersohn is the sole member of Laika’s Finance Team, but business is ramping up and he knew his current manual system to manage AP just wouldn’t be able to cut it.

Says Jake, “When I joined Laika, the legacy system for AP processing was 100% manual. I would receive invoices throughout the month and simply move them into a folder in my Gmail. At month-end, I’d open the folder and one-by-one manually enter each invoice into a Google Sheet and take action on it."

“Within the running Google Sheets AP tracker, I’d mark what's paid and unpaid, what has been submitted, etc. But business is ramping up, we’re using way more third-party vendors, and there are a lot more invoices coming through. I knew that the legacy Google Sheets process wasn’t an efficient or scalable process to accompany the hyper-growth of our organization.”

Jake’s Lightbulb Moment: Cash out is as important as cash in

“If you asked me how revenue looked for the last month or the last quarter, I could give you a clear answer and tell you specifically what was driving fluxes month over month - both from a GAAP and cash perspective.”

“But if you asked me the same question on the expense side of the house, I really wouldn't be able to tell you the key drivers of fluctuations month over month without a little digging into my existing systems.”

AFTER GLEAN AI: All-in-One Finance and Clear Visibility

Glean AI was able to provide Jake with the visibility, ease of use and automated processes that he knew he needed. “Glean AI gave us the obvious time savings from invoice automation, but the added ability to analyze historical expenses is what makes it stand out from a basic AP Automation offering like Bill.com”

"By far, my favorite feature is the ability to look at a vendor homepage and easily see all the recent and longer term activity in terms of spend with that vendor. I am easily able to find all the spend of a specific vendor and figure out based on these tables / dashboards what to expect for this vendor in the upcoming time period."

- Jake Liebersohn, Finance Manager

Proactive Reporting for Budget Owners

Glean AI provides that crucial visibility into expenses that a growing, Series A company needs. “An important part of my role is paying close attention to burn rate,” says Jake.

With Glean AI, Jake pulls together a monthly financial summary so that he can get a clear view of what is happening on the expense side of the business.

Glean AI’s the Smartest AP Solution Out There

Jake is very happy with his decision to use Glean AI for AP and spend analytics. “I would definitely recommend Glean AI over other AP tools,” says Jake. “It performs all of the day-to-day accounting automation duties that typically come with an AP platform, but in addition, it provides critical spend insights and visibility into what’s happening in each department.”