Date: 31.10.2025 (2025-10-31)
Alexander Illichmann 2.0 (31.10.2025) • Pitch him new idea • Last call: • Most processes for him are: Pull data from finance tool to Excel then to powerpoint or email to show to someone • Interesting areas: Billing, PO, deal approval • Pitch LOIs i signed
Questions: • Feedback to idea & slides (general sparring) • Intros
Notes:
• There is a lot of standardisation
• AP/AR big pain point for Google Maps
• Invoicing is a pain
• Customers:
• Two types of charging:
• Pay as you go via API: automated invoices are sent
• Automatic discounts - either online or based on contract
• Problem: Contract is not renewed on time -> wrong discount applied -> how fast can you identify the error and correct it -> check before sending and monthly closing -> bad customer experience
• Mobility / Automotive
• e.g. Ridesharing company -> person books a ride -> 250 API calls -> charged by ride -> manual verrechnet with Vertrag by ride or produced cars
• At the end of quarter OEM sends volume of cars produced -> temporary worker from Accenture generates Invoice and sends it out (via a SOP)
• Finance sees problems:
• Bad customer experience
• His data base is wrong
• He has to do adjustments -> a lot of pain
• Happens all the time -> biggest operational plan -> low single digit percentage of his revenue is false invoiced -> zehnstelliger Bereich der Kunden die falsches billing bekommen - often problem on their side
• Unclear why Google can not fix it
• He thinks mix of approval layers, ownership, resources to improve the system
• Things are constantly processes change -> systems degrade over time
• New discount methods are introduced
• Often these tasks are outsourced -> temporary workers -> a lot of turnover -> people make the same mistakes over and over
• it is a balance between fixing everything preventatively vs. living the errors
• How they correct the wrong numbers?
• They have a bad process and they are currently fixing it
• Current Process:
• Customer does 1 Mio API call of a certain squeue
• Rules for pricing and discounts
• Volume x Price calculation
• 2 days after usage revenue is in his system -> DB are not synched live but sporadically
• He has a manual process where he manually flags customers (e.g.
• 5k largest customers -> if red flags he escalates it to internal team -> sales team -> they check if correct and fix it if necessary -> takes a few days -> incorrect billing continues in the meantime
• Flagging of the problem is not the problem - only 5 mins
• Escalation is headspace -> ticket is opened -> many people work on it - multiple days -> escalation process is slow
• Automatic flagging would be nice - or automatic process below a certain threshold
• When billing is corrected -> 1 week to 3 months to go through approval chains until customer gets correctness - sometimes up to CEO - even for smaller amounts
• Most common use case: problem on customer side -> e.g. infinite loop is the cause for smaller amounts
• The big problems are caused by wrong contracts -> huge amounts - he did not want to say it on the call
• New Process:
• In console there are spending alerts -> instant flagging -> customer sees it and can react -> rather when customer has a problem on his side (e.g. infinite loops)
• Does not really tackle the case of Google making a mistake
• He was finance manager for manufacturing plants
• Problem: they did not have POs, random contracts pop up, nobody approved them etc.
• Forecast etc. is wrong
• Manual check of cost center, Laufzeit (distribute across months), Purchase Request for PO
• He is not super deep into AP/AR
• He can do intros, startups
• Austria