How Tempo Automated Finance and IT Operations

That’s the premise Tempo’s hiring platform is built upon. Tempo’s platform connects 2,500 exciting startups to over 80,000 jobseekers looking to launch their careers. Their tech matches people and startup jobs instantly, based on experience, skills, preferences and more, for the best possible hiring experience.

Keelyn told us that in 2020 during the first wave of Covid, things were fairly quiet relative to what they were used to, but now that things are opening up again, they are seeing tremendous activity, both on the candidate and client side.‍

“I can say that before Cledara, I was literally having nightmares about the day that we might have a fraudulent expense on the company card and everything would all of a sudden get denied. I’m so glad I can sleep in peace now.”

As the first finance hire at Tempo, Keelyn was in charge of bringing the finance function in-house. She tells us that a significant amount of her time has been focused on “automating as many finance tasks as possible.” 

“I personally believe finance is so strategic and valuable. Unfortunately, there's a lot of manual work required to keep the lights on traditionally from a finance perspective which is why I’m so passionate about automation in this space”, she states. 

She is really clear about it: “the more you can automate the manual workflows, the more value you can add to the business.” A couple of examples she uses to illustrate this:

“Any time that the business is contemplating a new geography or a new revenue stream, for example, it's really valuable for finance to have the ability to sit down and financially model out what that would look like. Unfortunately, this can be challenging to accomplish due to the manual tasks that eat up your day.”

She goes further: “I think that’s a shared concern among finance leaders that we would all love to see solved.”

Keelyn evaluated several spend management platforms before discovering Cledara. We asked her why she chose to go with Cledara to manage their SaaS.

“Spend management platforms have a big emphasis on travel and expenses and providing people with cards for that. I wouldn't say that was where our biggest issue was,” Keelyn says.‍

“Our biggest spend is on marketing and SaaS subscriptions needed to run the business and I felt like the spend management vendors were not necessarily focusing on that.” She provides the example of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

“On the offboarding side, I've probably spent about 30 hours chasing LinkedIn trying to cancel subscriptions. They typically don’t respond and if they do it takes months of back and forth with no resolution which is incredibly frustrating. Spend Management vendors don’t have anything to prevent that.” 

On top of that, Keelyn told us that the spend management pricing was considerably higher. “The spend management systems charge per user with a monthly platform fee rather than just a monthly platform fee. They looked quite expensive to us.”

“My biggest frustration was dealing with approvals manually and not having a centralized place for that to occur,” Keelyn tells us.

“I would frequently get messages and emails from people, saying, “Hey, I want to purchase X for Y amount”, or in the worst-case scenario, “I've already purchased this for X amount” and “here's the invoice”, which is absolutely not the way that you want to be doing things.”

“Cledara easily saves us over 10 hours a month. And it’s not just time, but stress as well”.

“I was literally having nightmares about the day that we might have a fraudulent expense on the company credit card and everything would all of a sudden get denied. I’m so glad I can sleep in peace now.”