Case Study: Interview with Andreas Herrele, Head of Finance at weXelerate

Over the past two years, the Viennese startup campus weXelerate has become a focal point of the Central and Eastern European startup scene. In one of the coolest locations in Vienna, an ecosystem has been created that helps startups from all over the world take their next steps. As an alumnus and service partner, COMMITLY is part of the weXelerate ecosystem. We spoke with Andreas Herrele, Head of Finance at weXelerate, about finance and cash flow planning.

Mr Herrele, you are Head of Finance at weXelerate. “Home of Innovation” is what it says on your website, and indeed weXelerate has stirred up the Austrian scene quite a bit in a relatively short time. What exactly does weXelerate do?

We bring interesting startups together with our large corporates and, with the help of the ecosystem, we support the startups in developing faster. To do this, weXelerate accompanies the corporates through their innovation process. Based on the needs discovered along the way, we scout matching startups with interesting business models and then accompany them for a while in the accelerator programme, the so-called batches, in order to promote their development.

In our building at Praterstraße 1, right by Schwedenplatz in the heart of Vienna, an interesting ecosystem of investors, the innovation departments of leading corporates, service partners, mentors and interesting startups has developed, and their joint activity has already produced a number of interesting success stories.

Andreas Herrele, Head of Finance at weXelerate

By now weXelerate has become an established and well-known name in the startup scene. I myself was pleasantly surprised at how high the level of awareness was in my own network.

That speaks for its success in the market and in the scene!

In doing so, weXelerate also fulfils a very important role as a community builder. COMMITLY is one of your service partners too. And if I read it correctly, a new location has just opened in Austria?

Yes, that is right. We want to carry the idea of the ecosystem into other regions of Austria as well, and with its very interesting business landscape and so many “global hidden champions”, Vorarlberg was our first choice. The project was presented to the public at a press conference on 29 May 2019. Bank für Tirol und Vorarlberg (BTV) has rented a suitable building, which is currently being adapted and will become the home of our ecosystem in western Austria from September 2019.

BTV will also play a role in this ecosystem, and a first well-known tenant from the startup scene has already been found. We are therefore confident that the ecosystem will come to life quickly, much as it did in Vienna, and will produce visible successes as early as 2020. Some innovations in our range of services will be part of it too; more on that will be announced at the office opening.

What challenge does this business model pose for you as Head of Finance?

Our offering is free of charge for startups. The accelerator programme is financed for the most part by the annual contributions paid by the corporates. This leads to a strongly cyclical inflow of cash, but a relatively linear distribution of expenditure. As a consequence, long-term planning and regular monitoring are needed in order not to run into a bottleneck. To reduce complexity, we have tried to organise the rental activities independently of that and to automate them largely. In this area both income and expenditure are approximately linear, so here you only have to manage the deviations.

You are at weXelerate as an interim manager. That is not an easy task either, since getting started in particular has to happen very quickly and efficiently. How did that go for you?

I actually eased in relatively “softly”. My predecessor realised that several important issues still had to be dealt with before she left and brought me in to help right away. Tasks were agreed between weXelerate and me in a contract for work. My first task was to draw up, together with the management, a business plan adapted to the current situation, which was also to serve as the budget for 2019. That made it very easy for me to get into the business model and then to take over the succession in an orderly manner. In this way, the items could be worked through one after another over the past months.

By now I have arrived at the last to-do: training a successor. So my engagement at weXelerate is also approaching its end, at least for the time being. It is an honour to be part of this great team with such an outstanding spirit, which makes the always clearly defined day of departure simply hard.

In any case I will remain part of the weXelerate network in the long term – further joint projects expressly not ruled out!

How have you organised the finance function, and what role does COMMITLY play in it?

In terms of size we are a typical Austrian SME with around 20 employees, and growing. It is only logical that the team here cannot be particularly large and that the division of labour is not yet far advanced. Because of the necessary cover arrangements, everyone has to be able to step in for someone else anyway. The core administration team consists of three people. One colleague is responsible for facility management; he takes care of all matters concerning the building, from investment to the lease. There is also a colleague who is responsible for invoicing, incoming invoices and HR administration. Accounting and payroll are outsourced to the tax adviser.

Classic controlling tasks, financing and legal matters sit with me. COMMITLY serves me as the central tool for managing my cash flow plan and for ongoing expenditure control. Regularly looking into the tool is therefore a must. I also use it as my main source of information about transactions, because for information purposes it is far more user-friendly than our bank’s online tool. As an additional feature, COMMITLY is also available to me as an app on my smartphone, and thus quite easily always and everywhere!

And how important is the topic of liquidity in general?

We are still a startup ourselves, so the question almost answers itself. It is obviously a big and lasting challenge. Since our income is strongly cyclical because of the business model, while costs are almost constant, forward-looking planning and ongoing monitoring are unavoidable. And that is where COMMITLY comes in. I use it to monitor expenditure against the budget target on an ongoing basis. In addition, even before the month-end close in accounting I can get a good feeling for where we stand.

You use the Team Edition. How have you embedded COMMITLY organisationally? Only in the finance area?

Because of how roles are distributed, I am the power user for COMMITLY myself. Regularly, at least once a week, we synchronise the account data and categorise the expenses. Thanks to the flexibility of the tool, we have restructured the categories so that they closely resemble our chart of accounts, which makes reconciliation very easy.

In addition to the finance team, however, we have also involved the management and offer them self-service with the tool. Thanks to the dashboard they can see immediately where we stand compared with the plan and can also check straight away which payments we have received.

Not uninteresting to be able to check immediately whether claims made about payment behaviour in a conversation with a customer or supplier are actually true…

What advantages do you see for weXelerate from using COMMITLY?

Thanks to the flexibility in categorisation, we have managed to estimate the result roughly even before the actual month-end close in accounting. On top of that comes the expenditure control function, thanks to the cash flow plan and the documented deviations. The information function for management is of course a great advantage too, because it does help to deal with a number of enquiries quickly without tying up scarce team resources.

And the fact that all of it is also available as a smartphone app crowns this effect and makes it a real top feature.

As an expert and interim manager you look after, and will look after, several clients. Will you also use COMMITLY at other companies in future?

Every company simply needs a good overview of its liquidity. While large companies with integrated ERP systems and an extensive in-house team have completely different options available, in the smaller segment software like COMMITLY can be a real support.

Especially in a constellation like ours, where accounting is outsourced to the tax adviser, COMMITLY helps a great deal to keep an overview and to have the most important information in view yourself in good time.

Many thanks for your time!

Credits: Photos by weXelerate