How to make life easy for finance professionals

Both Saurya Prakash Sinha and Prashant Borde had first-hand experience of what goes on behind the scene whenever an online transaction happens. For a customer buying online is a cinch, but for the finance department in either the e-commerce site or the many other players in the loop, this was a real problem. They had to keep track of which payment was for which order and the commercial terms of that particular order –whether there was an exchange policy or a return policy and the like – and when the payment was received, whether the money came in within the stipulated period and what not. Doing this manually involved several hundreds rows of entering the data on an Excel sheet and keeping track of the transactions.

How would it be if there was a product that made life easier for the finance professionals, one that did all the back-end reconciliation of financial transactions? This was the idea that triggered Saurya and Prashant to start Recko, which has built a SaaS product on the cloud that helps companies reconcile all financial transactions using artificial intelligence-powered tools.

Tracking money movement

In all the companies he had worked in, says Saurya, it was difficult to keep track of the money movement, more so when the companies started to grow. “There were a lot of transactions that were happening on the consumer side. We used to receive the money and we had to figure out against which order we had received the money,” says Saurya.

On e-commerce marketplaces, he adds, if a buyer has filled his or her cart with a number of items, each product will have a different commercial contract between the seller and the marketplace. All these details had to be kept in mind. “There is one order belonging to a person which is in refund and another order of the same person that is in exchange. An unusual level of complexity which the finance guys have to deal with,” says Saurya. The added challenge is that digital transactions are shooting up and the burden on the finance team only increases. All that they have now is a laptop and an Excel file. You can only do limited things with Excel, he adds.

“Which is where we thought we can build something for these guys which can help in reconciling transactions. Where we help finance teams in figuring out against which orders they have received the money and for which orders, the payment is pending,” says Saurya.

The idea behind Recko, according to him, is to help the finance professionals in companies reconcile transactions without a problem and give them the confidence that they are receiving the money at the right time and that they are settling their sellers at the right time with the right set of deductions.

Saurya and Prashant took nearly eight months talking to various players in the ecosystem, trying to understand the pain-points and how best they could solve them. Scale and complexity are two things that immediately came into the picture. Recko’s product does away with the manual entry of details of transactions, it keeps track of the commercial agreements and reconciles all the transactions. Speed and convenience are what it offers.

According to Saurya, Recko has close to a dozen customers and is getting more on board. As digitisation increases and online transactions shoot up, more companies will feel the need for a product such as Recko’s. At present, Recko does direct sale to customers, but will need to increase its marketing and sales teams as the business grows.

Focus on new-age companies

The company’s immediate focus, Saurya says, will be on new-age companies. One, that itself is a large and growing opportunity. Two, with a small team, says Saurya, there is only so much the company will be able to handle. There are a lot of enquiries from older, traditional companies, but Saurya feels the legacy issues and processes will need a lot more time to sort out.

The biggest challenge, he sees, is in ensuring the accuracy and safety of financial data that is being dealt with. The company’s challenge is to solve for accuracy, security and privacy at scale. Recko has been dealing with these issues from the engineering side. It feels there will be evangelisation required to convince more new-age companies to shift from manual to digital reconciliation of their financial transactions, both for convenience and scale.

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