Klear Made Clear

KLEAR is a financial technology platform that helps growing companies digitize and optimize their cash-conversion-cycles while they scale their sales, teams and processes to meet the demands of their largest and most important enterprise customers. Now let’s get clear on KLEAR.

Experienced CFOs and finance teams have a language all their own but some of our very best customers aren’t finance people; they’re builders, inventors, and engineers who have built something so unique and incredible that Fortune 1000 leaders in their industries want as much of that product as they can produce. Keeping up with this demand was nearly killing them until they found KLEAR. 

They didn’t make us learn how to talk about autonomous systems, landing on the moon, lithium battery chemistry or the intersection of biotechnology and machine vision and we did our best not to lose them in the jargon of treasury, CFO or FP&A. We’re going to lay out what you need to know to scale with KLEAR, whether you’re a formally trained CFO or an astrophysicist who believes that learning finance is a waste of your talents. The good news is, once you learn to use the platform (or more likely your team does) the software does the work for you.

Let’s start at the top. 

Most of our very best customers sell STUFF. This is an important distinction because some sell stuff wrapped in a service and some sell tech that’s unlocked by some hardware, but most of them (not all) sell at least one thing that you can hold in your hands.

The sale of that stuff happens through an order that is booked as a sale, and then a whole bunch of other things happen between their customer placing the order and when they eventually collect the money from that customer. All that time is called days-sales-outstanding. We all want that to be as short as possible without jeopardizing sales growth. We help you do that.

Some of the “other stuff” that needs to happen to fill the customer order is the procurement of components, finished products or other inputs to assemble/commission/deliver the system/solution/product that the customer ordered. You need to order these components and then pay your suppliers according to the commercial terms you have agreed to with them. The amount of time between you placing the order with a supplier and paying that supplier is called your days-payable-outstanding. We want that to be as long as possible without jeopardizing the supplier’s health, their commitment to deliver or the relationship in general. We help you do that too.

Sometimes it is best if you make some of the components, acquire some of the parts or build some of the pieces in advance and carry them as inventory. The inventory can be at your shop or factory (at rest) or can be on the way to the customer (in motion) and can either be owned by you (vendor owned inventory) or owned by your customer (customer owned inventory). This is called days-inventory-outstanding. Generally, we want this to be as short as possible but optimized to allow us to fill the order and make the customer “happy.” We also help here.

The CCC is a delicate balancing act across the areas of sales, product, operations, procurement, finance and compliance and this orchestration is the sum of dozens of daily decisions by a tiny team, or the coordinated effort of small informal groups or output of formal departments. We’ve built for each of these.

KLEAR is designed to be the single source of truth, the intelligent feedback loop and the suite of tools and financial products scaling companies need to optimize a dynamic and continuously evolving cash conversion cycle. Scaling into enterprise customer demand is hard: flying the airplane while building it while running out of fuel with a blindfold on…..no thank you!

If you’re building technology that turns electrons into 3D data models, animal behavior into medical insights, biomass into fuel, hydrogen into energy or anything similarly challenging, you know that your team is fluent in a language most of us can’t understand and that your technology product does the heavy lifting to translate a complex and specialized process into a clear set of steps that your customers can follow to use your product to succeed. The last thing you need is to learn another language to interface with the critical financial tools your company needs to scale. We’ve done the heavy lifting, we’ve done the translation, the steps are clear. We’re KLEAR and now we hope that you’re clear too.

Please contact us to learn more at success@klearbusiness.com