Our Conversation With Abhishek Bajaj

About Abhishek - Senior Finance Manager at Whatfix

Abhishek has a diverse set of experience in Finance while he has worked in multiple companies, right from as an consultant in EY, to a Finance Lead in Synup and a Senior Finance Manager in Whatfix.

Currently, Abhishek is trying to give back all his learnings in Finance to other Founders who are starting up.

When is the right time to hire a Finance Team in a company?

Series A

• CEOs’ high priority is getting to Product Market Fit and not building a Finance Team

• Few companies hire someone in Finance, and that too due to investor pressure.

• Generally, when investors want due diligence - the CEOs have to focus on hiring a third party to clear their data in terms of accounting, compliance and business finance.

• This can be clearly avoided if all the Finance and Compliance check is already done starting Day 0

Series B

• Abhishek talks about his experience of seeing a lot of companies hiring an in-house finance team after they raise Series B

Outsourcing the Accounting and Compliance Game

• Generally, Founders are seen to use an outsourced agency ( CA Firm ) for the purposes of accounting and compliance - Abhishek feels that’s the right way to go before the company becomes really large ( Series C + )

• In the early stages, These agencies are generally CAs that are referred by other startups or from personal connections

• Even Whatfix, which has raised a Series D - doesn’t have an internal team for accounting. They have completely outsourced their accounting team and they focus on business finance internally.

• A good approach would be -

• Accounting - Outsource as much as possible
• Compliance - Outsource as much as possible
• Business Finance - In-house is better

• Even when functions are outsourced, there must be someone in-house managing the outsourced partner

Compliance - Still a grey area for many SaaS startups

• Secretarial compliance is still a big grey area for a lot of finance folks in the SaaS ecosystem.

• There are a lot of compliance checks that companies need to be on top of - Since SaaS is still booming in India, there is a lot of opportunity to get better at it with shared learnings

• A compliance checklist would be super useful for startups in different domains - where Founders can get a list of all the things they need to do with respect to compliance.

Vendors in Finance and Compliance

• There is definitely a big hole in this space. There are not many vendors in Finance who are very well aware of what services are to be specifically offered to each of the founders in terms of both accounting compliance and business finance.

• Few good vendors

• Finadvantage - Positive-they have a global presence which means startups like WhatFix work with only one vendor!
• Guru & Jana
• JCSS
• MyStartupCFO

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