The summer of 2018 was an interesting one for me. My last startup had been acquired, and I was now working on some interesting projects within our parent company. The world was abuzz with innovation in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Digital Assistants, and more.
The lines of businesses in every major company were experimenting with these innovations in technology. That is, every line of business—other than the finance back office, which was being tasked to do more with the outdated tools they already had.
In other words, finance teams had to deal with a growing volume of supplier/vendor obligations, accounting, tax, and compliance updates, billing, and collections work. They had to do this repetitively, every day, every week, every month, every quarter.
The adage that “there’s no rest for the weary” was never truer than in the back office, and that’s where the genesis of Auditoria was born.
I was fortunate to have worked with my co-founding team, Adina and Gaurav, many times in the past. We set out validating our thesis that finance professionals were in dire need of help but were underserved by recent advancements in technology. We spoke with dozens of back-office and audit practitioners across a variety of industries, geographies, and career levels
Spoiler alert: the universal feedback from these conversations was simple, clear, and very consistent—despite technology advances in ERP, the back-office today is still largely manual. E-mail continues to be the primary communication method across internal and external stakeholders. Email serves as the workflow for approvals and notifications, and (unbelievably) acts as an evidentiary hub for information that is served up during an audit. Excel is the primary analysis tool of choice, and shared services functions that were either set up nearshore or offshore still suffered from massive task repetition and reviewing and checking of work completed by junior staff members.
We envisioned a different kind of world, one where software augments finance and audit practitioners in elegantly and efficiently executing their tasks while providing targeted and relevant analytical insights to decision makers. We felt that software should ambiently fit into the day-to-day fabric of engagement of the finance teams, and seamlessly speak the same language that they do.
And we felt the future of the back office was about providing an intelligent engagement layer that finance professionals leverage and trust to perform transactional and analytical tasks at scale, from small startups to enormous enterprises.
Enter Auditoria—the system of intelligent engagement of ERP. Auditoria sits as a simple veneer over your existing ERP applications, executing business processes and tasks, and engaging and interacting with vendors, customers, auditors, and internal stakeholders as a seamless extension of your accounting and finance teams.
We help procurement and collections teams remove the grueling friction in their daily tasks. We help FP&A teams with surgical insights around cashflow forecasting, predicting customer payment remittance behavior, and more. We help Audit teams gather evidentiary data needed to remain GAAP compliant. And for CFOs, we help modernize and transform the finance back office while supercharging their ERP investments.
I'm honored to work with an incredibly talented and passionate team of individuals with experiences gained from Oracle, NetSuite, Intacct, Intuit, Goldman Sachs, and more. I’m proud to work alongside a super talented team of data scientists with credentials from some of the most accomplished academic institutions including Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, and the Indian Institute of Technology.
At Auditoria, we're also thrilled to be backed by some of the brightest forward-looking minds in venture capital at Neotribe, Engineering Capital, and Firebolt Ventures, as well as supported and advised by leading finance and technology executives who’ve collectively amassed over two hundred man-years of experience in ERP, FinTech, Accounting, and Audit.
As we embark on this journey together, I look forward to sharing more about Auditoria’s vision, product, and market momentum. For now, I invite you to check out some of the assets on our website and if we can help you modernize and automate your back office while making your processes more resilient, please reach out.
We’d love to talk with you.
