The FastClose℠ Advisory Retainer
A monthly advisory retainer to design and help you implement a new strategic process for managing your company’s financials.
Online marketplace CFOs, does this sound familiar?
You or your team are drowning in transactions.
Reconciliations, if able to be performed at all, take days. Closing the books takes weeks. You don't know what to do to fix it.
Solid, reliable financial data has been scarce as far back as you can remember. Bad customer experiences with purchases and refunds are slowing your growth. Sometimes just serving the customer base you already have feels like a struggle. Demand is strong, but how can you capitalize on it when you spend so much time putting out fires?
Because what difference does it make how many new sign-ups you get next month if you can’t even accommodate the customers you already have?
Does it take you three weeks every month to close your books?
For online marketplaces, each transaction is complex and difficult to book correctly.
Reconciliations take forever, you can't meet deadlines, and sometimes even you don’t feel confident in your financial statements.
You’ve probably already had a taste of the negative impacts of that complexity. But to get around it, you also need specialized skills…skills most CFOs and operations leads simply don't have. Sure, you could take the time to learn, but time is something you probably have even less of.
A prolonged close isn’t just annoying, it’s bad for business. And it could lead to…
…error-ridden, misleading financial data
Decisions based on bad data can lead you in the wrong direction, further compounding the problem.
…terrible customer experience metrics
The buzz around your online marketplace will cool as customers flee your platform.
…the inability to provide core services
As transactional volume increases, at a certain point you will have no choice but to limit the number of users and/or transactions on your platform.
If you’re lucky, and don’t mind turning the finance team into the largest department in the company, you could hire an army of accountants who might be able to help pull you out of the transaction quicksand you’re trapped in.
Or if you’re unlucky you’ll wrestle with garbage financial data, lawsuits, and increasingly bad customer experiences that could even lead to you losing all your customers.
If this sounds all too familiar, my FastClose℠ Advisory Retainer could be for you
For the Advisory Retainer, I’ll design a new strategic process to manage your company’s financials, then work with your finance and engineering teams to oversee its implementation.
The Advisory Retainer is designed to:
Get you closing your books in days (instead of weeks)
Improve the customer experience by eliminating mishandled transactions
Build you the foundation you need to scale fast, with zero disruption to your core business
Save you the time, money and trouble of hiring — all of the above can be completed with your current team
Don’t worry — this is just a chance for us to talk so I can be sure the advisory retainer is the right solution for you.
What you’ll get
A solution to your transactional backlogs, and the guidance to see it implemented flawlessly: I'll use my expertise to build the type of bedrock foundation that’s given companies like yours the freedom to bring on tens of thousands more customers while spending less time managing the books and closing fast every month.
Unlimited access to me via email or video-calls, Monday – Friday. if a problem comes up, don't spend another second worrying about it. Instead, let the guy who eats problems like this for breakfast worry about it (that’s me).
Strategic guidance for every finance-related item on your roadmap. Help planning things out to anticipate and mitigate bottlenecks ahead of time. After all, the best way to solve a problem is to prevent it from happening in the first place.
A solution to your operational accounting problems, without having to hire a team of product or program managers.
Peace of mind that can only come from knowing you have a world-class expert on-call to help you at any time.
Confidence to move forward with your product roadmap with knowing you have the resources to anticipate and solve every financials gotcha you encounter along the way.
How does it work?
Research
I talk to your finance team to understand:
The overall monthly close process
The impact and importance of each of step in the monthly close
How to complete some of the processes used in your monthly close, so I can assist in a monthly close
Design
I use what I learned in step one to design a roadmap to sort out the transactional/reporting issues. The roadmap may involve new processes and/or if necessary, new scripting (code) to automate the more complicated, frequent, error-prone or time-consuming finance tasks.
Review
Next, I’ll review the completed roadmap with your finance and engineering teams, incorporate their feedback, and make any necessary adjustments.
Kickoff
I work with your accounting team to implement the processes finalized in Step 3. Next, I work with your engineering team to coordinate new scripting or —if they prefer— changes to existing code.
Finalize
Once the FastClose℠ process is implemented, I’ll be there to make sure everything we’ve worked together to put in place exceed expectations. No matter how long it used to take, your new close will be signed, sealed and delivered by the end of Day 3 every month from now on guaranteed.
Avoid:
Limiting or shutting down your core services
Missed deadlines
Inaccurate financial data
Bad customer experiences
Scale fast, with zero disruption to your core business.
Still Have Questions?
Q: What happens after I pay?
A: After you pay, you’ll receive a confirmation email from my scheduling software that will allow you to add the event to your calendar. You’ll also receive a receipt from my payment processor that you can use for tax purposes.
Q: What if I need to reschedule?
A: If you need to reschedule our call, just click the RESCHEDULE link in the appointment in your calendar.
Q: How do I know if this is right for me?
A: If you’re having trouble staying on top of a material aspect of your monthly accounting and wish you had access to an expert to help you transform a broken system into one that CFOs anywhere will envy, my FastClose℠ Retainer Advisory is for you.
Q: How is this different from the other services you offer?
A: Of the three services I offer, the Advisory Retainer is much more comprehensive than my one-on-one strategy call. And insofar as I don’t write code or develop custom software as part of the Advisory Retainer, it’s somewhat less involved than my FastClose℠ Implementation Project.
Q: Can other people from my end attend the call?
A: Yes! Feel free to invite your accounting or finance team, or other stakeholders, to sit in on a call.
Who am I, anyway?
I’m Jonah Purinton. As an accountant and software developer, I’ve spent the last decade helping some of Silicon Valley’s top CFOs and operations leads scale their accounting environments so they could stop fighting fires and focus on higher-level work instead. Since starting Reflex Accounting in 2016, I’ve helped many marketplaces, including hospitality-focused Urbandoor (acquired by Airbnb, August 2019) and esports disrupter Streamlabs (acquired by Logitech, September 2019) manage financial aspects of their product and internal back-office operations.
I noticed that CFOs were so busy, few had time to implement or oversee the (often slow and arduous) fundamental accounting processes. Even fewer had found time to consider how to adapt those fundamentals to fit the complex challenges presented by online marketplaces. The catastrophic consequences of transactional backlogs or oversights, two of the most significant threats to an online marketplace, were going unnoticed until it was too late. The inherent inefficiency and needless damage this was doing to businesses kept me up at night. Now I’m on a mission to elevate the humanity of the accounting profession, helping finance professionals make a difference by replacing busywork with real work. ✅
Limited Availability
I don’t shuffle clients off to junior contractors. When we work together, you work directly with me. To maintain a high level of service, I can only take on one new advisory retainer client per quarter. Book a call now to secure my earliest available opening.