When Stephanie joined Ladris as director of finance, she knew hiring wasn’t an option. She needed to quickly start budgeting, forecasting, and managing cash, but “A full-time finance team gets very expensive, very quickly,” she says. “Plus, I needed to be supporting executive decisions and I couldn’t be chasing someone down to review transactions. I needed a partner I could trust to just handle it.”
Stephanie created a decision matrix and weighed all options—hiring, using her existing CPA (who she liked), and several tech-forward options including Pilot. She chose Pilot.
“Pilot not only checked every box, but every single one of those boxes checked at a higher level,” says Stephanie. “So for me, that decision was very easy. I’d say it’s one of the best decisions I made in my first six months at Ladris.”
Stephanie was coming from a global publicly traded company to Ladris, a startup where the foundational financial components hadn’t been fully developed. The company was running lean, and she needed to build a whole function without a whole team.
“Startups often don’t think about finance until later. Ladris has brilliant founders, and credit to them, they saw the need,” she says. “There is just such a risk for startups that don’t have that infrastructure. Whether it’s the policies or rules or processes, if it’s not done correctly, if you aren’t supporting decisions with data, if you can’t trust that data, that’s the scariest thing. If you don’t have confidence in your books, what do you have?”
The Pilot launch was quick. Her Pilot bookkeeper, controller, and care team got her set up in the portal and retroactively filed the previous quarter’s books to bring her up to date. Thereafter, Pilot worked with Stephanie to fine-tune her accounting process until it was like working with an in-house team that she didn’t need to monitor.
“Normally, finance and accounting are extremely time-consuming,” explains Stephanie. “Most accounting departments, even at small companies, require so many processes—acccounts payable, accounts receivable, reconciliations, revenue recognition, and you have to follow all the rules that govern that. Yet the risk of not having it done well is enormous.”
The time savings exceeded her expectations. Rather than waiting for responses or emails like she had done with her prior CPA, she now had access to all her data in her Pilot portal and could run reports.
“Having the information on the platform available whenever I need makes it instantaneous,” she says. “We’re technology-enabled now, and that’s hours and hours saved every week.”
More than anything, Stephanie appreciates that she can trust that the Pilot team has things handled and she needn’t chase them. “I completely trust all the processes that are happening and I trust the outcome. That means I can focus on finding cost savings and scenario planning and ‘what if’ decision-making,” she says. Yet when she needs it, she always has her Pilot bookkeeping team to talk to. Response times are quick, and if she ever has to cancel a meeting, another is available right away.
That’s allowed Stephanie to focus more on cash management and building out the company’s 401k and other benefits. She’s spending more time handling equity in their cap table software Carta, revamping compensation plans, and forecasting for growth. She has since been promoted to VP of finance.
It’s all built on a foundation of financial data she can trust.
“In the end, you want every stakeholder to look at the numbers and have confidence in them. That’s the deciding factor for us,” says Stephanie. “You need to be able to rely on the financials so you can guide the business. Pilot is definitely one of the best decisions I’ve made at Ladris.”
Ladris Technologies is an AI Software company specializing in disaster response with expertise in evacuation, wildfires, floods, homelessness, and other crises.
