Built by the person doing the work.

January 2026. I was two and a half years into the job, running the beginning-of-month close for a multi-site Michelin-starred restaurant group in London. Same suppliers. Same invoices. Same chasing. I already knew exactly what the week would look like before it started.

That was the first time I asked why a person was doing this at all.

So I went looking for something that already solved it. Dext, Lightyear, ApprovalMax, and most of the others. That search told me two things. The problem was real, because a lot of good companies were attacking it. And none of them were attacking the part that actually hurt.

Finance runs on spreadsheets. And to fill those spreadsheets, we ask operations to keep spreadsheets of their own. I have spent six months working in a Michelin-starred restaurant, so I know what that request looks like from the other side. Twelve-hour days through a busy period, and then after service, someone has to sit down and type invoices into a sheet. That is not their job. Their job is to run the operation. Asking them to maintain a ledger is like handing someone a terminal when what they needed was a computer.

But finance cannot work without them either. Operations get quoted one price. We get invoiced another. Nobody finds out until weeks later, by which point the money is spent, the stock is eaten, and the number is already sitting in a report someone senior has read.

That gap is the whole product. It is also the name. Finio: Financial Operational Intelligence.

I started building it myself, learning to code as I went. Along the way I kept testing the other tools, and I found the same thing every time: before any of them worked, someone had to teach them. Rules, mappings, nominal codes, supplier by supplier, entered by hand.

And who does that work? The junior. The bookkeeper or the assistant. That is the highest-turnover level in UK finance. So the person configuring the system is the one who knows the least history and stays the shortest time, while the senior staff who understand the process control it rather than execute it. When the junior leaves, the setup leaves with them.

Finio sets itself up. Hours, not weeks. Nobody maps a supplier by hand, because I am not willing to build a tool that only works once someone has done a fortnight of admin to make it work.

Two entities, a full year of invoice history each, at real volume. One was 4,000 invoices across 200 suppliers, learned in 40 minutes. The other was 6,000 invoices across 377 suppliers, in about an hour and twenty. That was the entire setup, both times: no supplier mapping, no nominal codes, no rules written by hand.

The next hour I ran my month-start supplier statement reconciliations through it. It chased the suppliers and requested the missing invoices, credit notes and statements, and worked the whole process while I watched. Two days of work came back in two hours, and I spent thirty minutes reviewing the output.

The thirty minutes is not the point. The point is that the management reports went out days earlier.

I am a management accountant. Right now I run the month-end for a multi-site Michelin-starred restaurant group in London — the supplier statements, the accruals, the chef invoices that arrive as photos, the intercompany recharges between sites. I have reconciled the same pile every month for two and a half years.

Before finance, I spent six months working in operations in a Michelin-starred restaurant, so I have been on both sides of the invoice.

Finio is the tool I built because I was the one doing the work. Every feature in it exists because it saved me a specific afternoon.

ACCA finalist. First Class BSc in Accounting & Finance, University of East London.

Finio is built and operated by KRBUK Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under number 16247154, with its registered office at 2 Paul Street, London, E15 4QD, England.

The same entity is named on our terms, our data processing agreement and our Xero submission, so they all match.