Arclight ran month-end the way most Series C companies do: five spreadsheets, two systems that disagreed, and a finance team that lost the first week of every month to reconciliation. The close took six days on a good month — eight when payroll landed near a quarter boundary.
Basis connected their banks, cards and NetSuite in an afternoon. The continuous close meant every transaction matched the day it settled; by the second month, month-end was a review, not a rebuild. The March close ran in nine hours — with the audit trail already sealed.
Tessellate's board pack took two weeks each quarter — a model rebuilt from exports, stale before the meeting started. Scenario questions from directors took days to answer, and every answer spawned a new spreadsheet version.
Now the board opens the live board. Runway, burn and the hiring scenarios recompute against the actual ledger, and Devan answers 'what if' in the meeting, not after it. The quarterly pack became a link.
Five hundred people spend money at Bright Harbor — fuel, tolls, repairs, software. The controller's team reviewed every receipt after the fact, catching out-of-policy spend weeks late, when the money was already gone.
With policies compiled to the card network, the out-of-policy charge never happens — it declines in 240 milliseconds. Idle operating cash sweeps into treasury automatically. Sam's team reads a one-page exception report each morning; the yield line pays for Basis several times over.