Five disconnected finance tools, each with its own cost, login and workflow. I replaced them all with one custom-built platform, with AI at the core, that does exactly what the organisation needs and nothing it does not.
“We were paying for five tools and still felt like we had no visibility. Now everything is in one place, expenses basically manage themselves, and we've cut the cost of running our finance stack by more than half. It was built around how we actually work, not how some generic product assumes we work.”
A growing UK professional services firm running its entire finance operation across five separate tools, each adding cost and friction without adding much value.
Invoicing, cost management, expense tracking, bookkeeping preparation and financial reporting were all handled by different off-the-shelf platforms. Each came with its own subscription, its own interface, and its own data silo. Expense submission was particularly painful, requiring staff to manually log receipts through a dedicated app. The finance team was spending significant time moving information between tools and chasing submissions rather than working with the data. The organisation wanted to consolidate, cut costs, and get a single source of truth for their financial data.
Build precisely what they need, with AI doing the heavy lifting on data entry.
I led the design and delivery of a custom internal platform that consolidates all four finance functions into a unified tool. The platform handles invoicing, cost management, expense management and bookkeeping preparation, with dashboards giving management real-time visibility across all of them. AI reads incoming expense data and automatically generates reviewable cost entries, removing the need for manual input. Staff submit expenses directly through their messaging apps, with the platform processing submissions and routing them for approval without requiring anyone to log into a separate tool. Every feature was built to the organisation's exact workflows rather than adapted from a generic product.
Five tools became one, with AI handling the work no one wanted to do manually.
The organisation retired five paid subscriptions and replaced them with a single platform built around how they actually work. Finance team overhead dropped by around eight hours per week, the cost of running the finance stack fell by 60%, and management gained dashboard visibility they did not have before. The AI-powered expense processing and messaging app integration removed the two biggest sources of friction in the previous setup, and the custom build means the platform can evolve as the organisation grows.
A 30-minute chat, no pitch deck. Directly with Colin, no middlemen. Honest advice on fit, scope and cost.
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