Customer
Ocean.io
“It’s really so, so easy.”
Measured outcomes
Month-end close
Down 60%
Consolidation stopped depending on two different charts of accounts and became instant.
Finance team
3 people, 2 entities
A CFO, a part-time teammate, and an external bookkeeper, with no plans to hire more.
AP
Manual → automatic
Bills split into the right P&L accounts by AI rules, before anyone has to check them.
Ocean.io is a global B2B data and go-to-market intelligence platform, used by sales and marketing teams to identify, target, and win the right customers, across Denmark and the US.
Kristoffer joined as CFO of Ocean.io nine months ago, after previously running finance at another Danish, Nordic SaaS company. Ocean runs as two entities, Denmark and the US, that are really one company operating in two places, not two separate businesses to be managed apart.
That wasn’t how the finance stack saw it. Denmark and the US didn’t even share a chart of accounts.
The problem: two entities, two sets of books, no shared truth
Before Light, Ocean ran QuickBooks in the US and e-conomic in Denmark, alongside Pleo for payments and Corepay for the rest. “When I joined, we didn’t even have the same chart of accounts,” Kristoffer says. “The whole consolidation aspect was just not really working that well.”
The cost wasn’t just time. It was confidence in the numbers. “I knew that the reporting we did, the numbers we looked at, not just for reporting externally but just to look at the business, wasn’t right. It was hard to even answer how much we spent on a specific department.”
Ocean isn’t two companies. “We’re not two different companies, we’re just two different entities. It doesn’t make sense to look at things in different tools and different places.”
Consolidation, first
“The multi-entity consolidation, that’s the primary thing I really, really like about Light,” Kristoffer says. It was also the reason he chose it. “As the consolidation aspect was so important to us, it really made sense to choose a tool that had that built in from the start. That made me calm about other things that weren’t there yet. It’s not a 10-year-old tool, I understand there are still features to build out, but having that focus from the start meant it was a no-brainer.”
He wasn’t looking for a bigger, more complex system either. “We don’t need a lot of complicated stuff. We just need someone that understands what it’s like to build a business that’s scaling fast, has more than one entity, and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on the administrative part of it. The finance function at Ocean is there to help drive the business, not just make sure the numbers are right and report that to someone.”
AP that codes itself
“I really like that I can automatically split a bill into the right P&L accounts from the get-go, that I can just set that up. As soon as it’s approved, it’s already in the right place. That saves a ton of time, and I don’t need to spend a lot of time controlling or making sure things are right, because I can define in advance how it’s supposed to be.”
Approvals now run through Slack rather than a finance system nobody outside the team opens. Bank payments are still handled through Stripe for most transactions, with Light running AP and everything else related to accounting.
Support that feels like it matters
“Compared to what we had before, it’s out of this world good. I can just write in Slack and someone will reply within a few minutes. It’s nice to feel that you’re taken seriously as a customer, that sometimes it’s the CEO, sometimes a developer, sometimes someone I’ve never heard of before. If something isn’t working, it’s a code red for the Light team.”
What Ocean.io runs on Light
- Multi-entity consolidation across Denmark and the US on a shared chart of accounts, instant instead of manual.
- AI rules that split incoming bills into the right P&L accounts before anyone reviews them.
- Vendor approvals handled in Slack, with a direct conversation thread on any bill in question.
- New vendors created automatically from the incoming bill, with details filled in for review.
- Accounts payable and general accounting run through Light, with Stripe handling most payments.
- A finance team that has stayed the same size since switching, with no hiring planned.
Finance that scales without headcount
“I feel that we can scale, that I can spend a lot less time on just making sure things are running smoothly, on administration basically, and much more time on the commercial side of the business. I feel much more in control of the consolidated financials than I did before Light.”
Asked whether the team could handle the business growing five or ten times over: “I don’t see why not. I don’t see what another person would do in the current setup that we have. There is so little maintenance and so little manual work that we need to do.”
Kristoffer · CFO, Ocean.io
“It’s hard to find joy in an accounting platform, but Light can actually do that for me, in a way I’ve never experienced with any tool in this industry.”
KristofferCFO, Ocean.io
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