Introducing Elliptic

Elliptic is a blockchain analytics and crypto compliance solution headquartered in London, with presence in the US, Japan, Middle East and Singapore. Elliptic provides the world’s largest blockchain identity dataset, trusted by the world’s leading organisations to trace every transaction through the entire crypto ecosystem to gain a truly holistic view of risk.

As Director of Finance, Byron Cowie is involved in financial reporting, control and financial management, strategy, operations and talent acquisition.

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Xero for Core Accounting

We use Xero for many reasons, but ultimately, its plug-and-play API, extensive marketplace, broad direct bank feed coverage and overall user-friendliness make it adaptable to our ever-changing environment. We’ve certainly embarked on a tech stack longevity journey, leveraging marketplace apps to eliminate manual processes. Additionally, as a SaaS business, Xero’s recurring invoice functionality is a lifesaver.

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Satago for Credit Control

Satago is an excellent tool for automating credit control. It's affordable and easy to set up, delivering value from day one. Each week, we receive a wealth of information from our customers, ranging from basic updates like missing purchase order numbers or address changes, to requests for calls to discuss upgrading their package. A big shoutout to my colleague, Lindsay Britten, for implementing this.

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Tipalti for OCR & Payments

We recently implemented Tipalti to replace the “classic stack” of Dext, ApprovalMax, and Expensify, which had served us incredibly well for years. Tipalti offers robust, enterprise-grade controls (like global bank detail verification) and payment rails for a seamless order-to-payment cycle. While Tipalti is more complex to implement than some of the simpler Xero apps, it was essential for supporting scaling and consolidating our tech stack. A big shoutout to my colleague, Sam Mohungoo, for leading the efforts on this implementation.

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Stripe for Credit Card Payments

We use Stripe to enable customers to pay with a credit card. I really appreciate how the Xero integration works, with invoices being marked as paid as soon as the customer completes their transaction in Stripe, and the bank reconciliation being automatically suggested (even when Stripe settles multiple invoices in bulk). More recently, we've also allowed new customers purchasing small packages or educational courses to buy directly from our website, with Stripe powering these transactions.

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HubSpot for CRM

We’ve recently integrated HubSpot with Xero’s upgraded API connector to flow information from Xero into HubSpot. This allows our customer and sales teams to see which invoices are outstanding, helping with payment follow-ups. More importantly, it serves as a valuable customer health data point (e.g., a non-paying customer who isn’t using our tool may be at risk). A major benefit for finance is that we no longer need to provide updated age analyses to the business, as everything is now visible in real time. A big shoutout to my colleague, Nima Barzin, for implementing this.

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Mayday for Intercompany

With the growing number of multi-currency intercompany accounts and transactions, transitioning from a manual process to an automated tool became essential. Mayday not only saves time by pinpointing missed transactions, but it also goes a step further by providing the foreign exchange entries monthly to balance these at a consolidation level. A big shoutout to my colleague, Vanessa Rheeder at Iridium (our cloud accounting partner), for implementing this.

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Syft for Consolidated Reporting

Undoubtedly, the biggest change I made to our tech stack was implementing Syft to automate our management accounts consolidation tool. Syft transformed a well-designed but manual spreadsheet that took hours to compile into a simple click-of-a-button solution for management accounts, offering views that slice and dice our reporting in numerous ways. A big shoutout to my colleagues, Chay Stockdale and Vanessa Rheeder at Iridium (our cloud accounting partner), for implementing this.

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PayFit & Telleroo for Payroll

With most of our employees based in the UK, Payfit is an excellent tool as it integrates with our HRIS software (Bamboo) to automatically update payroll for the majority of the monthly changes. This allows finance to focus its time on the more material changes. Telleroo is a handy add-on that integrates with Payfit once payroll is processed, pushing all individual employee payments and bank details into a payment batch for release by the payroll reviewer. As an added bonus, Telleroo integrates directly with Xero.

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Brex for Virtual Cards

Brex’s virtual credit card service helps our employees travel, run events, and pay for minor goods and services on the go in real time. The direct integration with Xero ensures that all expenses are pushed into Xero and automatically reconciled with the bank feed. The convenient missing receipt tool allows us to focus on what’s missing and proactively request these. Additionally, our wider team often mentions that the email and Slack integrations make it especially easy to provide support using tools they use daily.

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