How I Stacked It
Every finance stack tells a story. How I Stacked It looks inside the tools, workflows and decisions real finance leaders use to build better, more scalable finance teams.
JENKI is an omni-channel matcha brand. They sell matcha drinks, powder, and bakes across bars, online and wholesale. With seven bars in London, they have ambitious plans to scale to ten by the end of the year.
As Finance Director, Luke oversees the financial operations of the business, from reporting and controls to supporting strategic growth.
The Stack
Xero for Core Finance
Xero sits at the centre of our finance stack, giving us the core accounting platform that the other tools feed into. As JENKI grows across bars, online and wholesale, it gives us a consistent financial foundation across the business. We are beginning to undertake very small tasks with the Xero MCP, but would like to see JAX improve.
Mayday for Month-End Automation
We use Mayday for prepayments and accruals. It has a great UI and, with accruals now added, it covers more of our month-end automation in one place.
Lightyear for AP
With seven bars and growing, Lightyear's AP automation saves us countless hours. They also offer great customer service after signing up, which many businesses do not provide.
EasyMonthEnd for Month-End Management
We use Easy Month End to ensure timely management accounts preparation and prevent omissions. It's easy to set up.
Syft for Reporting
Syft is extremely useful for producing management reports. I don't think it replaces Excel for preparing unique, detailed reports, but for the price point, it's an excellent product.
Ramp for Spend Management
We have recently moved to Ramp for spend management, and employee cards. We made the move from Pleo, as Ramp provided better expense controls than other platforms and the speed of pushing expenses in to Xero is a huge plus.
Staffology for Payroll
We run our payroll through Staffology. It offers everything we need and I feel confident in the product. However, it doesn't allow for site and revenue centre combinations, so I use a self-coded workaround.
Deputy for Workforce Management
With seven bars to staff, we use Deputy to manage scheduling and rotas across our teams. It handles the operational side of workforce management, while Staffology handles payroll.
Link My Books for Online Sales
Link My Books helps us bring our online sales data into the finance stack, reconciling transactions and making sure the right information reaches Xero without the manual work.
Tenzo for Hospitality Analytics
“With multiple bars to keep track of, Tenzo gives us a clearer view of performance across our sites”. The JENKI team use it to bring hospitality data together and help them to understand how individual locations are performing. The automation saves a significant amount of my time every week, and the introduction of their MCP is incredible. “We can make business decisions with data that would have taken half a day / day to pull together in a matter of minutes.”
Bombe AI for Revenue Prediction
An early adopter of Bombe AI, JENKI uses it to help predict revenue for both shops and online, and to inform decisions on the best new locations. “The small hexagons they use mean that we can look in to an area with an incredible amount of detail”. In hospitality being on the wrong side of the road can make thousands of pounds revenue difference so, so important to get right.
Claude for AI
Primarily used for drawing on MCPs of relevant applications, allowing the data to flow through correctly and securely.
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