Our conversation with Sreyanka Chowdhury

About Sreyanka - The Hustler

Sreyanka has been a pure hustler at Outplay - She is a one-stop shop at Outplay and makes sure she delivers her 110% in everything she does. 👩‍💻 This gets validated by all the praise that she has been getting from her peers in Outplay. 👏

Sreyanka comes with an experience of working in multiple companies like Pedagoge, Startups Club, Greedy Game, Synup before joining Outplay 💼

Finance Function in SaaS companies

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Generally, Finance is one function, since the nature of it not being revenue generating - Founders tend to neglect it in the initial phases of building it.

There are 3 stages of companies and how they’d handle Finance

• Companies with less than $1M ARR

• 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

Experience with working with Finance Vendors

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Generally vendors who work with SaaS companies have better understanding of SaaS finance than traditional CA firms.

Generally the notion of traditional CA Firms is that the company needs to follow up with them on different occasions to get things done - However, Sreyanka has worked with Guru and Jana for the last 6 months and has loved their service. Guru and Jana have expertise in working with SaaS companies in different fields.

• Finance

• Compliance

• Legal

• Accounting

• ESOPs documentation

While there are so many services being offered to SaaS companies, this is handled by a single POC so that the communication with the Vendor is sealmess.

Whatfix was one of the early customers for Guru and Jana

Where do we find Finance Leaders all in one place

There are lots of communities for Sales or Marketing, but is there a community for SaaS Leaders in Finance? Probably not.

However, there are a lot of internal groups like, whatsapp groups of Surge portcos, where all the founders and finance leaders hang out to connect.

Spendflo keeps doing multiple webinars targeting Finance Leaders and this would a good space to connect with Finance Leaders.

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