Just do it, dare to take the plunge. These phrases keep coming up when we talk to Snocks co-founder Johannes Kliesch. He dared to put all eggs in one basket and gave up his dual degree course in business studies to focus entirely on his own business. "Since then, things have been going very very well," the CEO says with satisfaction. But as sales records kept growing, so did the financial chaos. Until the current Team Lead Finance Rehan Choudhry took over and streamlined the financial processes.

The challenges

From the beginning, the demands on the finance team were big, Johannes says. In just the second month after Snocks was founded, Johannes and cousin and cofounder Felix Bauer got a loan for 50,000 €. "We were immediately in demand and challenged." The way accounting was handled, however, wasn’t ideal, Johannes recalls. "I was really bad at it, and Felix was rather average."

Growing business, growing pile of documents (aka chaos)

With a rapidly growing business, the team incurred more and more expenses. New merchandise, IT equipment, marketing costs - thousands of transactions quickly accumulated, all of which were paid with the traditional company credit card.  All in all, a difficult situation for Johannes, who was solely responsible for the accounting in the early stages. "Even back then, my heart beat stronger for sales and marketing and not as much for small-scale financial processes."

"Many underestimate the potential consequences of not being able to submit financial statements on time or submitting incomplete statements."

Over time, the accounting responsibilities at Snocks passed through various hands in the company. It became increasingly unclear who actually placed which orders and where the corresponding receipts had gone. "At a certain point, it actually felt like looking for a needle in a haystack. To give this issue such a stepchild treatment was one of our biggest mistakes" says Johannes. "It was a mess."