Automate First — Why Tools Come Before People

When revenue grows, most founders panic-hire. The books fall behind, invoices pile up, vendor payments get missed, so they toss another body at the problem. Then another. And another.

They built a finance team of 12 to do work that three people and the right tools could handle in half the time. Payroll balloons. Headcount soaks up cash. Turnover gets worse because the work is tedious.

I’ve watched $20M companies burn through seven figures annually on a finance function that still can’t close the books on time. Why? They automated nothing. Humans became the automation.

The Back Office Assembly Line is Dead

This mindset comes from an era when headcount equaled horsepower: more clerks, more reconciliations, more reports, more control.

Today, that model bleeds you dry. Good accountants are expensive, and bored accountants quit. Manual tasks are the biggest morale killer in your back office.

Modern CFOs understand this: Automate everything first. Hire second. Humans handle exceptions, decisions, and strategy, not data entry.

The New Playbook: Tools, Not Bodies

At $5M in revenue, you don’t need three AP clerks. You need an AP automation tool that:

• Collects vendor invoices,

• Flags duplicates,

• Routes approvals,

• Pushes payments,

• Syncs back to the GL,

• And logs every step for audit.

Same for AR: automate invoicing, reminders, collections nudges. Stop paying humans to chase checks.

Same for reconciliations: daily bank feeds, auto-matching, instant discrepancy flags. Nobody needs to download CSVs at midnight anymore.

Real-World Example

A client of mine was stuck at $12M in revenue, bleeding cash across the org but especially on a bloated finance team:

• Three full-time AP clerks,

• Two AR specialists,

• A controller buried in reconciliations.

We implemented best-in-class AP and AR automation and reconciliation tools. We re-trained their team as generalists. The headcount dropped from seven to three in six months. The books closed five days after the end of the month, not three weeks later.

Those freed-up dollars were reinvested in sales and product development. Revenue hit $20M a year later. The finance cost per dollar dropped by half. That one automation push alone freed $200,000 in overhead, directly adding to EBITDA, and that money funded ad spend and revenue growth instead of administrative salaries.

RAID Rule #1: Let the Robots Work Overtime

This is RAID in practice:
Redundant: Tools never call in sick.
Agile: You can scale transactions without hiring.
Intelligence: Humans focus on analysis, not data entry.
Data-Driven: Automated feeds mean real-time numbers, not guesses.

I tell every CEO: If you want a $50M company with a five-person finance team, every repetitive task must be eaten by a tool. Not someday. Today.

Where to Start

Not sure where to start? Here’s the must-have shortlist for a RAID-ready finance stack:

✅ Cloud Accounting System: QuickBooks Online or Xero at first, then NetSuite or Sage Intacct as you outgrow simple ledgers.

✅ AP Automation: Tipalti, BILL, or Melio.

✅ AR Automation: Chaser, Tesorio, or YayPay.

✅ Bank Reconciliation & Cash Management: Float, CashAnalytics, or your ERP’s auto-match engine.

✅ Expense Management: Ramp, Brex, or Expensify.

✅ FP&A Tools: Jirav, Cube, or Mosaic to ditch spreadsheet-only forecasting.

Start small. Add modules as you grow. Most pay for themselves in the time and FTE costs they save.

(Pro tip: I have affiliate links for every one of these tools. Use them, your back office will thank you.)

Your Future-State Back Office

When tools come first, you buy time back for your team. They stop being paper-pushers. They become analysts, advisors, and decision partners. They surface insights before your board asks for them. They focus on future cash flow, not reconciling last month’s bank statement.

No more building a finance department that collapses under its weight. Build a system where machines handle the drudgery and humans drive growth.

Next Up: Post #3 — Build Redundant Finance: No More Single Points of Failure

The next RAID principle: design your team so knowledge lives in the system, not in any one person’s head. When you automate and cross-train, you never fear vacation season again.

Follow along if you’re tired of paying people to copy and paste. Or message me — I build RAID finance teams for companies that hate wasting money.

#CorporateFinance #FinanceAutomation #RAID #MainStreetIQ #DigitalTransformation #ProcessAutomation