When Joe Blanchett talks about selecting and optimizing finance systems, you want to listen. Formerly at NetSuite and Deloitte, Joe is now the Sr. Manager of Business Systems and Finance Platform at SeatGeek. For the last six years, he's been deep in the weeds of identifying and diagnosing business challenges at SeatGeek, and selecting and implementing the tools to solve those challenges.
Recently, we sat down with Joe to discuss the Top 3 Ways to Uplevel Your Finance Tech Stack in 2024. You can watch that fireside chat here.
Below are five key takeaways from the conversation, including direct quotes from Joe. Enjoy!
1. Your finance tech stack needs a strong – but flexible – backbone
Your core systems form the backbone of your finance tech stack. These are systems that solve basic problems such as managing the customer list, income statements, and employee lists. But strategic foresight is key here. It’s important to select foundational systems that not only address current needs but are also capable of adapting to future demands and being able to play nicely with future additions to the tech stack.
"The three systems that we have that are fundamental to anything we do are our ERP system which is NetSuite, our CRM system which is Salesforce, and our HR system which is Workday."
2. Integrations make everything possible
Low-code tools like Workato are valuable because they can integrate many different types of systems and enable the automation of workflows across departments like finance, sales, HR/people operations, etc.
"Once you have the basic apps in place, you can start connecting things together. Step one is to get yourself a low-code integration tool."
3. The most important integration is between your finance system and your product
If your goal is to reduce latency and manual intervention in revenue recognition processes, the integration between your finance systems and your product is the highest priority. For SeatGeek, Leapfin has been transformative, drastically improving efficiency and accuracy by handling transactions automatically and at a granular level.
"What you need is an automated, rules-based system to integrate with your product, interpret your product revenue data, create journal entries at the transaction level and in accounting language, and then post journal entries to NetSuite automatically. The answer for us was Leapfin. We put it in place in 2021. It's connected to all of our payment processors and it's creating a journal entry for every single transaction that comes through."
4. Don't just be a data collector, be a data interpreter
You don't just want finance systems that can gather data, you want systems that can interpret that data across various business activities. Your general ledger is effectively a landing pad for all different kinds of financial information. So you need a scalable, cost efficient way to get all of that data, wherever it is, into your general ledger. And it’s crucial that you select tools and systems that are scalable, meaning they can handle increasing volumes and complexities of data without compromising performance or accuracy.
"Lots of vendors will provide out of the box integrations that will solve some basic use cases, but they're not going to take you as far as you want to go. In finance systems, you're not just creating data out of nowhere. You're not a data creator.
You are a data interpreter.
5. The job of enhancing your finance tech stack never ends
At rapidly growing companies, technology improvement is iterative. It’s vital to continuously evaluate and enhance your finance tech stack to keep pace with both internal growth and external market changes.
"You never stop doing more, especially in a high growth company. There's always stuff to do."
Want to see the full fireside chat with Joe from SeatGeek? Watch it here.
