Sensei Future-Proofs Financial Operations & Controls with Automation

Of the lessons that the pandemic taught us, few stand out like the importance of self-care.

The founders of Sensei, an ecosystem of sustainable farms and wellness retreats located in Hawaii, have long advocated for the importance of nurturing personal health. Larry Ellison and Dr. David Agus were inspired to bridge their technology and science backgrounds to help people lead longer lives. Participants of the Sensei experience immerse themselves in a wellness program that includes locally grown food and advanced meditation.

Backed by research, Sensei is disrupting the agriculture and hospitality industries with solutions that heal from within. Their mission of cultivating healthier habits would naturally permeate their company culture and employee development.

For Sensei, one of the main goals was to build out its finance and accounting team successfully. The first step was bringing on financial Controller, Courtney Santry, as the initial accounting hire.

“Our goal was to keep the team lean by implementing technology solutions that would grow with us—eliminating the need to hire more headcount.”

With a strong belief in software, Sensei was motivated to implement a solution that would improve operational efficiency, increase data visibility, integrate effortlessly with its ERP, NetSuite, and provide advanced capabilities that its previous payments platform, Bill.com, could not provide.

“It’s critical to implement a software solution that can scale with the business—regardless of volume.”

With Tipalti, Sensei has significantly reduced its accounts payable workload and streamlined vendor management.

From managing complex transactions to paying consultants, mom-and-pop shops, and international vendors, Santry can provide her team with the right tools to improve their processes and increase financial visibility.

“Having all our payments processed on time has alleviated the manual work for my team. Now, they can grow in their career and build longer relationships with the company.”

Plus, Sensei has benefited from Tipalti’s OCR recognition technology. The system knows when to forward bills to their designated approvers automatically. From there, the staff accountant can review the bill and skip any manual data entry. And by the time it’s ready to be paid, it’s already sitting in the Tipalti dashboard for the CFO’s approval. As Santry states, “the system continues to get smarter.”

For the wellness-minded at Sensei, the elimination of manual, busy work has enabled team members to explore more meaningful avenues of their jobs. With added functionality such as amortization schedules and features to build on PO matching, their team can expand their experience and expertise.

“We’re developing our human capital internally as opposed to spending money on manual, error-prone, processes where people can’t keep up with growing volumes.”

And as practitioners of personal growth and wellness, Sensei can attest to the invaluable asset of time.

“When a company is scaling, you need smart systems in place. We don’t want our team to get stuck in a role they can’t grow out of.”