“We doubled the business and the finance team stayed at three.”

All Gravy builds the employee app that frontline teams actually open. Communications, onboarding, training, compliance, and daily operations, in one branded app for the people running the floor.

Customer

All Gravy

Industry

AI-powered employee app for hospitality and retail

Entities

Denmark, the UK, Sweden, Norway

Website

allgravy.com

The company started in Copenhagen in 2020 as a financial wellness product for hourly workers, then rebuilt around a wider problem after more than 300 interviews with hourly and gig employees. It now serves over 250 businesses and more than 100 brands, Honest Burgers, Pizza Pilgrims, Dishoom, and Q8 among them, on $7.3M raised to date and a team of 65 across Denmark, the UK, Norway, and Sweden.

The founding argument is a sentence their CEO repeats often. Nobody should need seven terrible apps to pour a pint. That argument held everywhere in the company apart from the finance function, which ran on seven systems of its own.

The Challenge

The problem: four ledgers, three point solutions, and a chart of accounts from a different company

Every market gave All Gravy a new entity, and every entity brought a new ledger. e-conomic in Denmark, which carries roughly 95% of transaction volume. Xero in the UK. Fortnox in Sweden. Tripletex in Norway. Pleo sat on top for card spend, Corpay for supplier payments, Farpay alongside it.

Local systems demand local people. Each market needed a bookkeeper who could read the interface and knew the quirks, which turned four ledgers into four dependencies and four places the close could stall.

Sebastian Sandorff Jacobsen, who runs finance and ops, puts the test simply: “We always have to look at the foundation and ask whether it scales 10x. We kept adding tools as we added entities, and each of them worked to a point. Orchestrating a close across all of them was the problem.”

Card spend made it worse. Pleo generated 500 to 600 transactions a month with no direct link into any ledger, so every one of them went in by hand. A single missing receipt held up the entry, which meant somebody had to track exceptions across two systems while the close waited on them.

Underneath sat a chart of accounts built for an earlier version of the business, years before All Gravy became a SaaS company. Bespoke contract terms forced manual invoicing work in e-conomic. Pulling a consolidated number for investors meant assembling it by hand across all four systems.

The Solution

The rebuild: six years of history, reconciled and moved

Sebastian joined in February. Light had been in conversation with All Gravy for around six months by then with nobody in the seat to own the decision, so working out whether to go ahead, and how, became his first job. Linea joined in mid-April, and the migration became hers.

All Gravy moved its full transaction history into Light, back to the company’s founding in January 2020. Every year was reconciled against trial balances before import. The Denmark entity alone accounts for roughly 200,000 transactions.

The team rebuilt the chart of accounts from the ground up for a SaaS business, with custom dimensions for department and country in place from day one.

For Linea Meldgaard Andersen, the finance analyst who ran the import, the payoff arrived the morning it went live: “Going from logging into four different systems to seeing every entity in one place was the part that changed my day.”

Sebastian is blunt about migrations in general.

“ERP migrations are painful as a general rule. You can have a less painful experience or a very painful one. The Light team answered us at very late hours of the night, which matters when you are three people running a project this size.”

All Gravy’s finance stack

Seven systems before, one after.

Before

• e-conomic, Denmark
• Xero, the UK
• Fortnox, Sweden
• Tripletex, Norway
• Pleo for card spend
• Corpay for supplier payments
• Farpay alongside it

After

• Light, across all 4 entities
• One ledger, one chart of accounts, custom dimensions for department and country
• Card spend and global bill pay built in
• AP, AR, approvals and collections on the same record

Contract to invoice, with nobody in the middle

All Gravy’s contract terms were always too bespoke for standard tools to generate correctly, which is why invoicing stayed manual in e-conomic for so long. The team built its own CPQ tool and connected it straight to Light. A contract closes in HubSpot, and the invoice generates without anyone re-entering a number.

That is a finance team building on the ledger rather than working around it, and it holds the shape their own product takes with customers.

Bills that read themselves, approvals on the metro

Bills arrive by email and Light’s AI reads and codes them on arrival. Nobody opens them. Nobody keys them in.

AP and AR now sit on one sub-ledger across all four entities. Approvals and reimbursements run through Slack, which puts them wherever the team already is.

“I am on the metro with nothing else to do, so I go through my approvals there,” Sebastian says. “It fits the workflow we already have rather than asking us to build a new one.”

He traces that back to when the system was built. “When I started in February, we were at an inflection point with AI. Systems built in the last century cannot integrate it the same way, because it was never organic to how they were built. Light was built AI first, and that shows in the experience.”

Dunning, handed to an agent

Collections used to mean downloading balances, assembling a list, reading back through the history with each customer, and writing every chaser by hand. It is low-level work that eats a finance day.

All Gravy runs dunning as an agent in Light. The agent tracks outstanding balances across all four entities, reads the correspondence history with each customer, and drafts and sends the reminders.

“The dunning agent gives us the full picture of what is outstanding and handles the chasing. That used to be my afternoon.”

One close, four entities, five days

Month-end now takes around five days.

Month-end now takes around five days. “Our close used to be excruciating. Lots of systems, lots of bookkeepers, lots of places where the whole thing could stall,” Sebastian says. “Five days is good for a company our size, and we get there without anyone sitting up all night at the end of the month.”

Balance, All Gravy’s bookkeeping partner, spends 30 to 40% less time on the books than before. That comparison flatters the old stack, because All Gravy doubled over the same period. Twice the business, and the people keeping the books spend a third less time on them.

What All Gravy runs on Light

• Group entity management across 4 trading entities in Denmark, the UK, Sweden, and Norway.
• Month-end consolidation and close.
• A chart of accounts rebuilt for SaaS, with custom dimensions for department and country.
• Full transaction history from January 2020, reconciled against trial balances year by year.
• AP with AI reading and coding bills on arrival by email.
• AR and invoicing, generated from a custom CPQ tool connected to HubSpot.
• Dunning and collections, run by an agent.
• Approvals and reimbursements in Slack.
• Card spend, replacing a standalone provider.
• Global bill pay, replacing two standalone payment platforms.

The Result

The future of finance

All Gravy doubled while its finance team stayed at three, and the people in it now spend their time differently.

“We want to remove the time spent on pure transactional work and move it to strategic planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Getting accuracy in the forecast means we can be certain we are spending where we should be.”

The asks for next are already on the table. Full automation across every payment rail. A live treasury view across every connected bank account, showing what is coming in, what is going out, and what the company holds, without waiting for the close to say so.

Seven systems became one, and six years of history came with it. Four countries now close in five days, on a finance team of three.