Our Conversation With Kanishka

About Kanishka

Kanishka, a Chartered Accountant is different from others. He is very keen to improve his network & continuously tries to upskill and keep himself relevant. His career in the startup space is a testament to this.He has held various roles in finance and accounting at several different companies. He started with Due diligence in KPMG, then was “one among the thousands” in Honeywell automation, to moving back to another big 4 (PWC) for Assurance and then finally settling down in startups like Synup, Salesken and Corestack.  His responsibilities include managing financial statements, budgeting, fundraising, financial analysis, and engagement teams. He has also worked on business development and improving control processes, and has experience with audits and reviewing financial statements.

He has a strong skill set in the finance and accounting field and has taken on increasing levels of responsibility in his roles. ♥

Finance Function in SaaS companies

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What most people don’t realise is that Finance is much larger than accounting & compliance.

• In the early stage, accounting is a priority because of annual audits or compliances but finance as a function is not given due importance. However, it’s important to understand that the Finance function can actually foster a company’s growth.

• Startups focus on managing the finance only once they get VC funded.

• There is a shortage of relevant finance talent for SaaS since most of the CAs or Commerce professionals are in traditional areas of bookkeeping, taxation and audit. Hence their understanding of the space is limited. Things have improved in the last few years & it will take a few more years for the Indian market to mature.

• Kanishka got trained in the space by Rohit in Synup, and now passes on the learning to his teammates in Corestack. This cycle goes on this way in Geometric progression 😀

• VCs generally insist on someone in-house to manage the finance function, even if part of it is outsourced

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• Generally Founders take the onus of spending their time in the finance function.

• Founders generally work on getting the numbers for MRR/ARR - This becomes a tiresome job once the number of customers increase.

• Some companies in this phase don’t do the accounting in the right way - which eventually bites them back when they want to take investments. They have to clean the data again during due diligence.

• Companies with more than $1M ARR | Series A funding

• Finance team is built out with maybe 2-3 people in the finance function
• Accounting/Ground work is generally outsources to third party vendors.
• Vendors are either taken from founder network or investor network. For example, Sequoia or Accel can refer finance partners to its portfolio companies.

• Companies with Series B Funding

• Hire a CFO and have a finance team

Where do we find Finance Leaders all in one place

Finance leaders are beginners when it comes to networking. It’d be a great idea to bring them all in one place. We could host webinars for startups, but getting good audience to listen to it is not easy.

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