Founded in 2019, Orum is moving fast, building out its money movement platform and significantly growing its headcount. With such accelerated growth, Elisa knew that an AP solution was needed that could unlock greater operational efficiency and provide her team with more robust, actionable data.
About Orum
What they do: Orum is a startup that creates a frictionless financial system that enables real-time money movement with proprietary intelligence.
Location: New York City
Employees: Less than 100
Industry: Fintech SaaS
Pain point: As a fast-growing financial infrastructure start-up that closed a $56 million Series B funding round in June ’21, Orum has no time to waste.
But when it came to accounts payable, Elisa Rodriguez, Orum’s Sr. Manager of FP&A, knew she was spending too much time manually consolidating data, chasing approvers, and trying to identify relevant spend trends and insights using the limited data she had.
Elisa was looking to maximize efficiency on the process of consolidating vendor spend from various spending tools used throughout the company. Every week, this required several hours of maintaining and compiling data.
What’s more, once the data was consolidated, Elisa still didn’t have easy access to the kinds of information she needed to derive meaningful insights on spend trends and patterns. Just figuring out which GL accounts/categories expenses should be mapped to was a time consuming exercise. And determining whether certain costs were prepays for future services or costs for services already provided often required spending time digging into individual invoices. More strategically, Elisa also wanted to see spend patterns over the past months and know if Orum’s pricing with vendors was competitive. Her existing tools and processes did not readily provide this data.
“I was told that Glean aggregates spending data, initiates payments, and provides key insights regarding vendors and spend, so I immediately booked a free trial. Once I started using the system, I knew it was exactly what we needed at Orum.” says Elisa.
Implementation was quick and easy; Elisa set up a forwarding rule for invoices and immediately, information began flowing to Glean’s intelligent AP platform. The results were almost instantaneous. What previously took several hours now took just minutes.
“Not only does Glean save us several hours a week, but we now have access and more granular visibility into our vendor spend, giving us the ability to drill down into any bill to understand what drove variances. This helps us immediately determine what to do next. This would’ve previously taken hours or even days, and its now done in minutes with Glean.”
The Glean platform recently alerted Elisa that a monthly usage charge for one of their vendors increased significantly, prompting her team to dig in and find out why. This ‘glean’ is a strategic insight that the platform provides to users, taken from its broad, contextualized analysis of data.
Says Elisa, “Gleans are bits of information that the system automatically provides, telling me, for example, when a vendor is charging more than expected or that a new or unexpected line item has been introduced to an invoice. This feature is an added bonus that separates Glean from every other AP solution on the market.”
Elisa is very pleased with her decision to elevate Orum’s financial management using Glean’s intelligent AP solution. “The Glean interface is user-friendly and intuitive, the software does so much, including automatically generating reporting and accounting entries at the line-item level, providing visibility into our vendor spend, organizing vendor information, and saving vast amounts of time on our payment approval and initiation process. I would absolutely recommend Glean for any AP team.”
Learn how Glean can save you time and empower your AP team to make faster, intelligent decisions. Contact us at info@gleancompany.com to see Glean in action.