2023 Company & Service Updates
To valued customers and friends,
As 2023 begins, it’s an exciting time to reflect on everything we’ve achieved together and look ahead to the possibilities of the coming year.
Below you will find a full update on everything you need to know. We will also be following up to have in depth conversations to ensure we are 100% aligned as we kick off the New Year!
Company hi-lights from 2022
We experienced tremendous growth and opportunity
hiline was recognized by Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest growing companies in the country for 2022.
We cracked the top 3 fastest growing Finance-as-a-Service companies in the nation for 2022.
We’ve established ourselves as thought leaders in the ecosystem, being recognized as evangelists for the 'future of finance’ by the likes of the AICPA, Bill, Gusto and more.
We formed an advisory board
a collective of brilliant business builders, investors and mentors excited about engaging with the leadership team at hiline to build an amazing company – Whoop!
Sales & Growth
People
Product, Marketing & Partnerships
Technology & Automation
Operations
We formed an advisory board
a collective of brilliant business builders, investors and mentors excited about engaging with the leadership team at hiline to build an amazing company – Whoop!
Sales & Growth
People
Product, Marketing & Partnerships
Technology & Automation
Operations
We have learned a lot along the way
Growth is great, but hard.
We hit an inflection point this past year and ran into some scalability issues. We empathize that you might have noticed, and at times it caused some unwanted stress and disruption. Thank you for your feedback, patience and trust. This learning informed almost everything you read above about what we’re celebrating and planning for the future.
Better educate our customers.
Better educate our customers on how to best utilize, understand and think about our services. We’ve heard from you that our service packages are not totally clear – you don’t always know what’s included and what’s not. This confusion has been compounded over the years as our services have evolved and we’ve recognized that. We’re currently working our way through our customer list to ensure we are aligned for the future.
Introducing hilineOS
hilineOS is what we’re calling the FinOps tech stack that we’ve been procuring, implementing, operating and maintaining to propel finance into a leading function in your business. The best part is, you’re already using it!
To supercharge hilineOS, we’ll be constantly shipping tool and service improvements to bring more speed, accuracy and capability to our work together.
hilineOS Features
⭐️ New! Strategic Tax
We launched our new Strategic Tax model to better align with hiline’s overall vision for the customer experience. We said ‘no more’ to the traditional way of doing taxes. It’s ‘taxing’ on all of us, and the compressed periods prohibit us from engaging with you all as advisors throughout the year the way it should be done. We had over 96% adoption thanks to you all, and we look forward to working together to thoughtfully plan your financial future!
⭐️ New! Strategic Finance
The future of finance is forward-looking, dynamic and adapting to ever-changing environments. Supporting this vision calls for a tool that consolidates financial and operational planning into one place and tracks against multiple forecast versions at the same time. That tool (we learned the hard way) is not Excel.
We’ve been running a pilot on Basis with its CEO since October and are excited to announce that we will be upgrading Virtual CFO subscribers and customers with forecasting needs from Excel into this Basis + Strategic Finance offering.
Expect a full rollout to happen in the February/March timeframe with more communication to come.
⭐️ New! A Piloting Opportunity
What do you think of making CFO experts available to complement your hiline team for industry-specific, highly strategic projects? The caliber of CFO would be someone who has worked for or advised companies valued at $1 billion+, raised substantial capital, and/or worked through sizeable, successful exits. If you have an interest in learning more, please reach out me.
⚙️️ Improve! Eliminate friction and redundancies
We believe we have a big opportunity to eliminate redundancies/bottlenecks in these areas and work more effectively together:
Coding deposits:
You’d like to see this done more regularly, and you’re finding the process redundant, emailing us remittances and informing us who paid what and when. We totally get it! We have some ideas here, and we’ll be communicating those later this quarter.
Bill process:
The current standard is bi-weekly check runs. Most of us manage our business through cashflow and having this delay between approving bills and paying bills can be frustrating. We agree! There are some technology enhancements and a process overhaul we are working through to make things simpler that we will be communicating later this quarter.
Class tracking + Spend Management:
Assigning invoices and receipts to classes, departments and customers is too reactive, creating redundancies at the end of the month and ultimately slowing down the availability of your financials. hilineOS is an input-based system, meaning we want to have this work be done on the front end of the process leveraging the tools and systems we’ve put in place. We are upgrading hilineOS to replace Dext with Divvy as our spend management solution for the future. Divvy was acquired by Bill.com, and the two companies will be merging platforms and interfaces making it convenient to access our tools in one place.
⚙️️ Improve! HR tech matters
Your HR tech stack strongly influences your ability to attract and retain top talent, as well as creating a positive and productive employee experience to your team.
As of January 1st, we are standardizing our HR tech and providers to make your experience and your employees’ experience that much better. We’re continuing to leverage Gusto for payroll and HRIS needs – they continue to be the best in the business.
We’re also partnering with Gusto as a broker for health insurance, AP Intego for workers comp, and Guideline for 401(k) plans. The good news is that we can seamlessly integrate all these providers together and manage through Gusto’s platform. This is going to eliminate mistakes and issues for all of us. Working with 50 different brokers who operate in a paper-heavy model without consideration for how that fits into our collective financial operations has caused far too much friction and inefficiencies for us in the past. This is how we move forward this year. We empathize that everyone has relationships with insurance companies, but our responsibility to you all is to ensure we establish the best processes, seek out trusted resources, while ensuring compliance and accuracy. We are certainly not mandating this right now for existing customers, but will be making our rounds later this year to talk through this more as it relates to you.
What to expect next
Incoming meeting requests from myself and the team to ensure we are 100% aligned on your service offering, address questions, and clear any operational challenges or hurdles that may be lingering.
We appreciate your loyalty, grace and understanding in advance as we work together over the next quarter+ to take this to next level for all of us. Reach out to me directly any time if you have questions, feedback or concerns ever about your experience with us, or our plans for the future.
