Harriet Hope joined Arbolus as one of its earliest finance hires and built the tech stack from scratch. Arbolus is an expert network, connecting clients with specialists for on-demand insights across a fast-scaling, global business. Harriet was VP of Finance there, and our very first guest on How I Stacked It.

Now CFO in Residence at CFO Techstack, she looks back at how her stack evolved from that first HISI to the one she left behind at Arbolus, including expansion into India and Costa Rica along the way.

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Accounts Payable: Spendesk → Spendesk

This tool handled our invoice processing and payment automation from day one and continued to work well for us throughout. When I left, we were focused on finding equivalent solutions in India and Costa Rica, where we'd opened new offices.

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Credit Control: Chaser → Chaser

Chaser automates our invoice chasing and fitted what we needed. Arbolus isn't a high volume invoice business and most clients were good payers, so we always had a low percentage of overdue invoices. It was the extra bit of help to stay on top of things.

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Global Payments: Trolley → Tipalti

We made a huge move from Trolley to Tipalti a few years ago, mainly driven by needing self-billing functionality for our global payouts. As an expert network, we needed proper documentation to match payments made to experts, who we pay in high volumes but relatively low individual amounts, globally.

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Automated Google Sheets: G-Accon

G-Accon syncs our accounting data straight into Google Sheets, and we still use it for as much as possible. But we were beginning to struggle with pulling very large data sets given the volume of transactions, particularly expert payments. We were exploring solving this through an FP&A tool with more power for pulling data.

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Cash Flow Forecasting: Cash Flow Frog → FP&A tool (in progress)‍

We were mid-implementation of an FP&A tool to migrate our cash flow forecasting onto, moving on from Cash Flow Frog. Great in theory, but a real test of team capacity. We'd had attrition and a lot of team change, and it's a tool with a steep learning curve. A good reminder of how much planning and change management FP&A implementations need, especially without a dedicated FP&A resource.

Consolidation: Joiin → FP&A tool (in progress)

Like cash flow forecasting, we were working to bring our multi-entity consolidation and group reporting into the FP&A tool alongside actuals, forecasting, analysis and dashboards. Good progress, but complex. Joiin itself is exceptionally user-friendly for consolidating across entities and is quick to implement and maintain.

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Month end: Mayday → Mayday

Mayday still does the heavy lifting on our intercompany reconciliations and invoicing, and we adopt all the single entity features relevant to Arbolus Need I say more?

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