Enterprise
The challenge
Natural’s finance team managed expense data from 12 countries using a patchwork of regional tools, shared spreadsheets, and manual processes built up over years. Every region operated differently. Every system exported data in a different format. Reconciliation required a team of three people and took the better part of two weeks every month.
The CFO had no unified view of company spending—regional finance leads sent weekly summaries by email that were already 5–7 days old by the time they arrived. Policy enforcement was equally inconsistent, with different approval thresholds and expense interpretations across regions.
“We were flying blind. I could tell you what we spent last month, roughly. I could not tell you what we were spending this week. That’s a problem when you’re managing a $40M annual expense budget across 12 countries.”
Daniel Park, CFO, Natural
What Fifthogo needed
Natural needed three things simultaneously that no single platform had previously delivered: true multi-currency support with automatic reconciliation, custom approval chains that could enforce different policies by region and seniority level, and a unified dashboard giving the CFO real-time visibility across all 400 employees worldwide.
The solution
Payflow’s enterprise team handled the full implementation, working directly with Natural’s finance leads in each region to configure approval chains, spending policies, and integrations with their existing QuickBooks and Xero instances.
The rollout took two weeks. On day one of week three, all 400 employees were live. Every expense, in every currency, from every region, was flowing into a single dashboard in real time. Multi-currency reconciliation happened automatically. Custom approval chains enforced regional policies without manual oversight.
“The first Monday morning I opened the dashboard and could see live spend data from London, Singapore, and São Paulo at the same time—I didn’t quite believe it was real. We’d been trying to get to that for three years.”
Daniel Park, CFO, Natural
The result
Reconciliation errors dropped to zero in the first month and have remained there. Month-end close dropped from two weeks to a single day. The three-person reconciliation team was redeployed to financial analysis and forecasting. In the first quarter, Natural’s finance team identified $180,000 in duplicate vendor contracts across regions, renegotiated two enterprise software agreements based on actual usage data, and caught three departments trending significantly over budget mid-month—early enough to intervene.
“The ROI conversation is easy. We found $180,000 in savings in the first quarter. That’s not counting the time savings, the error reduction, or the peace of mind. The platform paid for itself before we finished onboarding.”
Daniel Park, CFO, Natural
