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Sophie Conaghan is an experienced finance director with specific expertise in the technology sector. Alongside her current role as Finance Lead at CharlieHR, she is growing her own side business, Finance for Founders, while raising a young family.
In our interview, she shared her career journey to date, how she uses automation to streamline finance functions, and how she juggles work and family life.
Bespoke HR Software for Small Businesses
Nick Levine: Can you tell me what CharlieHR does?
Sophie Conaghan: CharlieHR is HR software tailored for small businesses. It’s specifically designed to be super easy to use, knowing that most small businesses will be moving their processes away from spreadsheets. It’s easy to set up, and there are no long or complex onboarding processes. We’re a small UK business with 35 employees, so we operate similarly to our target customers.
Overseeing Systems and Processes and Outsourcing The Rest
Nick Levine: What does your role at CharlieHR encompass, and how is the wider finance function run?
Sophie Conaghan: I’m the one internal person, and we outsource everything else. My role is to oversee all the systems and processes that feed all the data flows to Xero and make sure our management accounts and leadership reporting are operating…I also liaise with the operations team, the management accounts team, and separate compliance accountants. [Additionally], I keep an eye and ear out for the heads of each function for any interdependencies that are going to affect systems, processes, and data flows.
Nick Levine: Can you tell me more about how reporting works within the business?
Sophie Conaghan: I tell [the outsourced management accounts team] they own the trial balance in Xero. I then review it monthly with knowledge of what has been happening in the business and [look out for] whether that has been translated into the management accounts.
Growing Finance for Founders
Nick Levine: Alongside your role at CharlieHR, you also run Finance for Founders. What does the company do?
Sophie Conaghan: Finance for Founders provides practical, jargon-free education and coaching for founders and their C-suite teams who are grappling with articulating their business model and monitoring their performance.
The key message that I coach around is demonstrating the value of knowing your numbers and caring about finance as a business tool, not just as a compliance function. At present, I deliver the training to accelerators, VC firms, and software companies that have a link to founders or target founders as one of their customer types.
Balancing Act
Nick Levine: And you also have a young family. How do you balance your time with all your work and personal commitments?
Sophie Conaghan: I currently split my week. Essentially, it’s half and half, with two and a half days a week for CharlieHR and the other half for my own stuff. This is predominantly Finance for Founders, but I also have three young kids. The next six weeks are probably going to be less than half the week on Finance for Founders, as the older ones are off school.
Nick Levine: How old is your youngest?
Sophie Conaghan: He’s only a few months old…At the moment, we’re able to make use of shared parental leave. Also, we’ve been able to set ourselves up, working from home. We’re both part-time, so we are eligible for shared parental leave. Working from home, [my husband] is here so I can take breaks to feed the little one, but he’s with dad full-time.
Centralizing and Automating the AP Function for Efficiency Gains
Nick Levine: Automation technology in accounts payable (AP) and across the wider finance function has led to significant efficiency gains in relation to accurate and real-time data, alongside saved time. Can you give me an example of a finance project at CharlieHR that resulted in greater levels of automation?
Sophie Conaghan: Sure. We’ve always used technology for AP, but previously we were using different platforms for activities such as virtual spending cards for the C-suite, employee benefits, general invoicing, and SaaS subscriptions. The virtual spending cards provider also had several manual steps to ensure cards were topped up.
Nick Levine: So you weren’t maximising efficiency gains?
Sophie Conaghan: No. [Our AP function] had been piecemeal built, and the different platforms weren’t talking to each other. We started again to find just one provider that solves the key problems. We had added stuff that had been useful at the time, but we were spending on three products, and we wanted to reduce costs and simplify things.
We switched to a single provider to fulfil all AP workflows and set it up by business functions so we could match it to our Xero tracking categories, so that our tracking category reporting flows through and is automated.
Self-Service and Reduced Data Entry
Nick Levine: Having completed this project, what would you say have been the main benefits?
Sophie Conaghan: There have been two key benefits. One is less finance work on data entry, from fully automating accounts payable. Secondly, there is the added benefit that the [new platform] is self-service across the whole business. This means you can streamline the number of finance queries and tasks as people can do things like query whether an invoice has been paid, and request new suppliers and an increase in budget. This gives people more autonomy. It’s like a signal to the business that we trust employees with our money. We’ve also got controls behind the scenes that are really important, too.
Thanks to Sophie for chatting with me and sharing her inspiring story of carving out her own path as a leading modern finance professional, while growing her own business and raising a young family. Keep your eyes peeled for the next post in our Next Gen Finance Leaders series.
