By replacing spreadsheets and disconnected tools with a dynamic, connected finance stack, Sara and her team created a stronger foundation for faster closes, better forecasting, and scalable growth.
Building finance for the next stage of growth
When Sara joined Tunnl three years ago, she came in to help strengthen the company’s internal accounting and operations as the business matured. Tunnl has continued to evolve as an audience intelligence company serving Fortune 500 brands, agencies, trade associations, and public affairs groups.
As the company grew, Sara and her team were managing finance across a mix of systems and spreadsheets. The setup worked, but it created too much manual effort for a lean team that needed to move quickly and support the business with confidence.
Rather than wait for those issues to compound, Sara took a proactive approach: build the right finance foundation early, before scaling made it harder.
Outgrowing disconnected systems
Before the new stack, the finance function relied on Sage Intacct, Insperity, BILL, Expensify, and a 65-tab financial model. With a fractional accounting team involved, keeping the ERP and the model aligned took constant manual effort, and because forecasting ran off that same model, planning was only ever as reliable as the manual inputs behind it.
A lot of critical work was still manual:
Invoices were being sent one-by-one by Sara
Prepaid, deferred revenue, and fixed asset schedules were maintained manually
ARR was tracked in a separate Google Sheet
Missing customer and vendor tagging made downstream reporting and imports harder than they should have been
The cost was more than inconvenience. A reactive financial model left little time to optimize performance or make better-informed decisions in real time.
Choosing a stack built for scale
Sara led the evaluation of the next generation of tools with a clear goal in mind: create a finance ecosystem that was dynamic, connected, and easier to operate.
Tunnl ultimately built its stack around:
Rillet for ERP
Rippling for payroll
QuotaPath for commissions
Abacum for planning, reporting, and replacing remaining spreadsheet-driven workflows
For Sara, the priority was never just adopting newer software. It was building a setup that could help a small finance team operate at a higher level without having to grow headcount at the same pace as the company.
Early impact for Sara and her team
The transition is still underway, but the team is already seeing meaningful benefits.
Faster close
Since going live on Rillet, Tunnl has been closing about one week faster.
For a team that had been closing late in the month, that improvement creates much more room to use the data, not just reconcile it.
Less manual work
Processes that previously depended on spreadsheets and one-off effort are becoming more automated. Prepaids, deferred revenue, invoicing, and reminders are now handled in a more scalable way.
Ultimately, that frees Tunnl’s finance team to spend less time maintaining workflows and more time focusing on the business.
Better access to answers
With more centralized data and stronger AI capabilities in the stack, finance questions can be answered more quickly. That matters during close, board prep, and all the moments when finance needs to move fast and deliver clarity.
Why Abacum is an important part of the stack
As Tunnl continues building out Abacum, Sara sees it supporting a wide set of important workflows: financial statements, cash forecasting, headcount planning, client gross margin analysis, and new planning spaces that can replace remaining manual spreadsheets.
That fits how Sara and her team want finance to operate. Not as a function buried in static spreadsheets, but as a team working from dynamic data that can support better planning and faster decisions across a growing enterprise.
A thoughtful rollout, done the right way
One of the strongest parts of Sara’s story is how deliberate the rollout has been. Tunnl has been navigating meaningful complexity, including an ERP switch and broader company changes that come when a startup officially starts looking like a scale-up, and Sara has been candid that getting the data and structure right takes time.
That care shows a finance leader thinking long-term: putting the right systems in place now so the company is not forced to untangle bigger problems later.
Looking ahead
Tunnl’s finance transformation is still in progress, but Sara and her team have already established the direction: a modern finance stack centered on Abacum, Rillet, and Rippling; fewer manual processes; faster closes; and a stronger operating foundation for growth.
For a lean team supporting a company just turning 5 this year, that kind of foundation matters. It gives finance the ability to stay close to the business, move faster, and scale thoughtfully as Tunnl continues to grow.
