resources

HQ

São Paulo

Founded

2000

Industry

Non-profit Organization Management

Employees

200

Leading the High Impact Entrepreneurship Movement Around the World

Endeavor supports high-impact entrepreneurs by connecting them with the tools and mentors that they need to build thriving companies and inspire countless role models. One such tool is Rydoo, an award-winning FinTech software that automates expense management to enable businesses to focus their time and resources on innovation and growth.

In this short case study, we speak with Endeavor Brasil’s CFO Cassiano Souza about the challenges and highlights of working in and with high-growth businesses, how to put processes in place early on to scale, and how Rydoo has helped them with this.

Transforming Processes to Prepare for Growth

As explained by Rydoo’s CEO and Co-Founder, Boris Bogaert, when you run a scaleup or early stage business, you have to put processes in place early on to support growth:

‘A common mistake that early-stage companies make is not automating processes in order to support scale. At the start, your first employees typically adopt hybrid roles, covering everything that needs to be done. But this simply isn’t scaleable once your business grows. You need to find ways to innovate where you can to save time and resources from the start.’

Endeavor Brasil was quick to realise this. Before Rydoo, their expense management process was 100% manual. They relied on the laborious traditional method of printing a form, filling it in, chasing their boss for signatures and triple checking for mistakes. This didn’t resonate well with employees, as their CFO Cassiano explains: ‘Everyone in my department hated doing expenses. We have 80 employees, and used to receive 50-60 forms a month with an average of 6 expenses on each. We wasted a lot of time, a lot of time, taking care of expenses. ‘There were a lot of mistakes. We had to rework the expenses over and over. Everyone hated it and everyone suffered.’

Fast & Seamless Implementation

After a chance meeting with Rydoo at the end of last year, Endeavor realised that it was time for a change. They needed to save time and resources and boost productivity and morale. They were delighted at how easy the transition was, as Cassiano explains:

‘There was immediate uptake. We implemented Rydoo in the first week of January 2016. Within two weeks all 80 of our employees were using it, and by the end of January every single expense was processed through Rydoo. Infact for the whole of 2016, not a single employee expense has been processed outside of Rydoo. It really is that simple. We love it.’

Based on Endeavor’s insights you could achieve a ROI of over 1,605%

Time is Money: The Real ROI of Expense Management

Being a CFO at an ambitious high growth company while also dealing with a diverse client base of 70+ innovative startups, Cassiano recognises the tangible ROI behind freeing up his resources’ time. ‘Our old expense management process took 1 employee, 1 week per month before.

With Rydoo, it now only takes around 2 hours a month. That translates into huge ROI, and allows us to focus on strategy and growth.’ Let’s look at the bigger picture here If you pay your finance person in charge of expenses 35,000 EUR per year, and they spend 12 weeks a year on expense management, then that costs your company 8,077 EUR.

Based on Endeavor’s analysis, with Rydoo it would only cost your company 474 EUR . So you save just over 7,603 EUR per employee in the finance department meaning a ROI of 1,605%. (ROI = Net Profit / Total Investment * 100.) So not only would your finance team have more time to allocate to more business-critical tasks, but you would also have extra capital to invest in innovation and growth.

Easing the Administrative Burden with Real-Time Reporting

Today’s CFOs are the heartbeat of the company. They need to shape business strategy and drive innovation in new markets and directions. Cassiano speaks to how Rydoo’s real-time reports and dashboards give him the perfect support in his role:

‘The CFO needs to oversee the whole company- he’s always thinking of the whole process. If you use Rydoo, everything is well organised. The reports are really very good. If I need to find a receipt for a specific expense it’s really easy to find. Unlike the old days where I’d spend ages filtering through a whole library of files.’

Endeavor’s team also particularly like how they can snap and digitise expense receipts even quicker with Rydoo’s innovative OCR technology: ‘What caught everyone’s attention is the software’s ability to recognise the receipts. It works 99.9% of the time and they love it. It has our budget structure. The cost structures are there. The approval works very well.

Building Brand Advocates

The power of building a team of passionate, committed brand advocates for your company cannot be underestimated in the early days when long days and late nights are par for the course. Cassiano speaks of the ‘very strong performance culture’ at Endeavor, one that mirrors Rydoo’s own culture and that of the majority of startups and scaleup.

It is important to keep employee morale high within this high pressure work environment. We need to put processes in place to relieve the burden where possible, to let our employees focus on what they are passionate about. Cassiano explains how Rydoo has significantly boosted employee morale: ‘Over these 11 months using Rydoo, I haven’t received a single complaint about the system, and everyone used to complain a lot about the old process and how time consuming it was. The team really value and recognise how Rydoo has improved our internal processes. They really, really like it.’

We all really love what we do. We are all fighting together. But we are strong fighters.

Conclusion

In an entrepreneurial world where high-growth companies compete to impact and influence new markets, smart businesses such as Endeavor recognise the need to automate processes in order to allocate time and resources where they are really needed. And technology such as Rydoo is at the core of this movement towards automation and innovation.

‘The heart of Rydoo is technology. It’s different and it’s better.’ Cassiano Souza

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