2min chapter

The Role Forward: A Strategic Finance Podcast cover image

Turning Finance into a True Strategic Business Partner: Russ Jones, Former CFO, Shopify

The Role Forward: A Strategic Finance Podcast

CHAPTER

The Importance of Automation and Finance Technology in Shopify's Hypergrowth

I mean lessons aside from for finance people I think the real lesson here is just bring Russ in because your business goes from not that much revenue to massive amounts of revenues so feels like a great move for all these companies. Well the whole billing process I've seen companies particularly if they've done a lot of M&A you can see a company that has four or five billing systems in place and now it's very sort of cumbersome to try to do that. The more you spend probably the more you're willing to accept in terms of the system not being as good as it could be where the whole Shopify philosophy is that someone during their lunch hour could get the system up and running right but

00:00
Speaker 2
I mean lessons aside from for finance people I think the real lesson here is just bring Russ in because your business goes from not that much revenue to massive amounts of revenues so feels like a great move for all these companies so love to hear all that I think the last thing I'd want to ask to round out this kind of concept of you know essentially what you were doing in the back end to support Shopify's hypergrowth is any thoughts you have beyond what you've said already about the importance of automation and finance technology and maybe a little bit about how that's evolved like you've seen kind of the evolution of what finance tech looks like so maybe the difference between what you focused on automating maybe it was expense reports in your days at Shopify versus now when you're working with companies you're consulting like what are some processes that they should really focus on automating away so they can focus on that hierarchy that you
Speaker 1
mentioned. Well the whole billing process I've seen companies particularly if they've done a lot of M&A you can see a company that has four or five billing systems in place that they're trying to manage or they had one way of pricing and now the business is changing they're doing another way of pricing and now it's very sort of cumbersome to try to do that so I think the extent that you can make sure you not only that it's cost effective but you have that flexibility that as you need to pivot or you buy something new that you can sort of adapt to that which is it's interesting for enterprise software I mean Toby used to say that the more you spend probably the more you're willing to accept in terms of the system not being as good as it could be where the whole Shopify philosophy is that someone during their lunch hour could get the system up and running right so yeah so I think that's something that people should think about and when we were looking for a GL the amount of volume that we were sending actually was more than the GL systems out there could handle and so we had to build another system between sort of the Shopify platform and the accounting system that could then consolidate that and the added advantage there is when we were had to be socks compliant and get audited that sort of subsystem was in scope but the platform itself it's a scope and so that gave us some flexibility there as well.

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