How Finance Automation Backs A Complex Business Model

Reveal is no stranger to the value of data. As an eDiscovery solution provider for law firms and legal professionals, the company provides aggregated data and analyzes troves of data in their discovery and investigation efforts in an automated way using artificial intelligence (AI).

With its business model built on AI-powered data analytics, Reveal understands the importance of data strategy. But a year ago, as a relatively small company, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Garvey said the back office was not as automated as you might have thought.

Thanks to a merger and investment last month, the company is now in high-growth mode, making digitization an even greater priority to support continued expansion. Speaking with PYMNTS, Garvey reflected on how the company has made progress in its modernization efforts to drive financial process automation and efficiencies and took a forward-looking view of how finance and IT can collaborate to accelerate progress on the digitization front.

Supporting The Business Model

Because Reveal offers a digital service to its clients, it does not operate on a straightforward billing model. Instead, explained Garvey, the firm bills on a subscription basis and a usage-based model if clients’ usage goes beyond a certain threshold.

The result is a fairly manual billing process that involves collecting data from its cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“In terms of our back office, we’re not terribly digitized or automated,” Garvey said. “We do have some automation in place in terms of calculating our bills based on usage, but even that needs a little bit of manual tweaking.”

As the company works with AWS to further streamline the billing process, Garvey noted that his digitization strategy is to automate the less strategic workflows surrounding that billing operation, thus freeing up resources and time among finance staff to focus on the nuances of calculating what customers should be charged.

Today that means the adoption of QuickBooks Online, but Reveal is exploring NetSuite to automate accounts payable and accounts receivable. And while Garvey acknowledged that there is still plenty of ground to cover to digitize financial operations, the company is quite advanced in terms of payments digitization: The firm is phasing out receiving check payments in favor of receiving ACH transactions, while the company itself pays its vendors via ACH or wire transfer.

Closing The IT Gap

NetSuite isn’t the only third-party technology provider Reveal is eying today. Garvey said the company is in the process of integrating automated reporting solutions from the corporate performance management platform Jedox, which will be able to sit atop all back-office platforms to aggregate data.

“The way we do reporting now is fairly manual, and systems don’t talk to each other,” he pointed out. “This will help bring together data from disparate systems in an understandable form.”

When exploring third-party FinTechs, those technology companies’ ability to demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) and provide customer success stories is paramount. But just as important for Reveal is the ability for solutions to integrate into NetSuite and other portals it will use.

Part of that data connectivity value stems from the fact that the CFO today is no longer tasked with solely crunching the numbers and running reports. Rather, the CFO must execute those reports to make a strategy represented on paper a reality.

Indeed, said Garvey, his role within Reveal exclusively requires him to not focus on day-to-day accounting or reporting but rather to devise and promote company-wide strategies in collaboration with other professionals within leadership roles.

With data and automation being such critical components of achieving those goals, the CFO is also fostering a close relationship with the IT department, a collaboration that Garvey suggested should no longer be considered outside of the norm within any firm that wishes to modernize.

“In our company, the head of IT is at an equal level to me,” he said. “We’re equals, and by definition, we have to collaborate together. That indicates how important it is in this company and should be in just about any company.”