CFO Channable | Finance & Operations | Adviser | Coach | Investor | From efficiency to possibilities
Question to my network: what’s on your mind when considering your (finance) tech stack ? I am looking forward to facilitating a session at Partech's (one of our investor) unconference end of the week and I was wondering what is critical in your eyes, on both sides of the SaaS conundrum: As a buyer, I am mainly looking forward to tools that are not too complex to use, and deliver on their promises in terms of jobs to be done at a fair price. Beyond this, I am looking for reliability ⌚, innovation 💡 and value creation 📈 in proportion to its costs 💰 . As a solution, we try to balance some of the above with the business potential, the costs to maintain and create room to explore venues for expansion. Of course we will explore this from a finance point of view so I also intend to cover a few specific categories based on some of the great work by Ben Murray: - Core accounting and invoicing - Close management and revenue recognition - Forecasting and budgeting - Cap table and employee equity A few other questions I personally keep pondering: - Specialized solutions vs all in one tools ? - Scaling tools internationally across different entities (our Danish acquisition opened my eyes to some of the limitations of our existing stack) - Users management and data portability (T&C: "we will remove all access when you give notice minimum 3 months before end of term and maximum 6 months before", wait, what ?) - Experience of a relevant use of AI within a finance solution (I haven't seen one yet but I bet someone will comment with a pitch for one below) - Best & worst experience of a tool and why (Chatham House rule applies) Anything else we should talk about ? Looking forward to meet again with Guillaume Nordlinger Maximilian Egger Prashant Varsani and get to know Christel Bourgeais Linda A. Isabelle Chabot Mc Neill Axel Compain Jean-Guillaume BRATEL Raphaël Nahum David Vanek Anne Delgoulet #unconference #saas #financestack #paris #peerlearning #inspirationawayfromthedaytoday
Always curious how a tech stack changes when you’re expanding across borders. Especially related to consolidation and reporting
Reminds me of my thoughts when I just moved from a corporation to a smaller company: it is a luxury to have a real option to choose from nice and user-friendly solutions that can be implemented quite fast. I remember how I was saying 'Wow', trying every other tool that Channable uses. Of course, those tools have their downsides, but the fact that using them is not a torture makes me think: it should be N1 criteria for choosing one 😅
I would add that tools should easily work across different teams. For example, it should be easy to share data and customer insights with development, marketing, and sales, without requiring additional upgrades for team members who only need occasional access.
I think it's important to be cautious when choosing tools these days. So many of them are marketing AI: AI tools, AI features, AI everything 🤖 but some of these technologies aren’t fully optimized or functioning as well as they should yet. While it’s great to stay on top of new innovations, we need to ensure that they actually work and solve the problems we’re trying to address.
Sales Lead Northern Europe @Channable
2moThe one thing I struggle with most when going for specialized tools is how to tie them together to ensure data quality into one central point of truth. Usually this is the CRM. Therefore Im glad to see more and more tools go for a platform approach solving the above issue. Next to that, with ever changing headcount and variance in usage, as a buyer I want freedom in seats/usage of a tool instead of a fixed number in a contract im being held against.