How Skyflow Cut Collection Time by More Than Half and Recovered $1.9M — Without Hiring an AR Team
— Brody Ehrlich, Head of Finance, Skyflow
About Skyflow
Skyflow is a runtime data control platform for agentic AI. The product protects PII (personally identifiable information) across many different types of businesses. As Skyflow scaled its customer base, the finance function — a small, lean team led by Head of Finance Brody Ehrlich — needed to keep pace with a growing AR workload without expanding headcount.
Before joining Skyflow full-time, Brody had run his own startup, then spent years as a fractional CFO supporting a portfolio of early-stage companies through Burkland — covering everything from marketing attribution to geo-imaging to cybersecurity. He started working with Skyflow about four years ago when the company was very small, then joined full-time about two years ago to manage all financial operations.
"What I really loved doing was really talking to founders and early stage companies and trying to figure out how to build a business from scratch."
The Challenge: Collections Was Just People, One Invoice at a Time
When Brody joined Skyflow as Head of Finance, the AR motion looked like every other early-stage finance org he'd seen:
"We had just people. So everything was manual. And, I think that's common across seed-stage companies, series A — even into B — most companies are pretty manual."
The setup wasn't broken on the customer side. Invoices had banking info for ACH and wires, a QuickBooks payment link, and Stripe for credit cards. None of that solved the part that actually breaks:
"Generally speaking, if a credit card gets declined, or if someone's not paying, or whatever, you're going after that person individually. You're just calling and/or emailing… one-by-one-by-one, trying to find a way to get an answer, get some sort of explanation, get the money in as quickly as possible. So it's just a time suck, generally."
The structural problem behind that time suck is Skyflow's customer base. Early-stage SaaS companies are largely paid by other early-stage companies — companies with their own cash flow constraints:
"A lot of large enterprises aren't being the first customer of anybody. So you're dealing with customers who have cashflow problems themselves. And then, there's a lot of manual work that goes into collecting that money."
Why Not Just Auto-Dunning?
The obvious question Brody fielded — and the one most heads of finance ask first — is whether the automated dunning built into QuickBooks, Stripe, or CPQ tools could close the gap. His answer:
"Auto dunning is better than nothing. It's helpful if the reason that they're not paying you is because they forgot. But how often is that the reason that they're not paying you? It's pretty much zero."
"Generally speaking, they're not paying you because they're trying to manage their own cash flow, and they're concerned about paying their employees first. As somebody who has been in a position where I've run a company and there's no money left… you pay payroll first, and then you play juggle, circus with the rest of the money."
The result is that automated dunning gets pattern-matched and ignored:
"When you're just auto dunning, everybody knows it's an auto dun. It's some form or email that continues to come through, and there's really no psychological pressure."
The same logic applies to the broader CPQ / contract-to-cash category that claims to handle collections:
"The contract-to-cash tools that profess to do what Invoice Butler is doing are using automated dunning… but if you haven't forgotten to pay it, you're just trying not to pay it. You need an individual touch."
Why Invoice Butler (vs. Hiring)
The alternative most lean finance teams reach for is hiring. Brody's logic on why that wasn't the right call at Skyflow's stage:
"Finance leaders in early-stage companies are probably in a similar position to me. We are the last part of the organization that gets any budget. Admin is not technically revenue generating, so it doesn't have the leeway of sales and marketing to spend and try to figure things out and hire people."
"We are also the ones who are implicitly expected to set an example in spend and efficiency. Hiring is the last thing that any of us can do."
The math made the choice obvious:
"Why would I hire a person to do it when, if hiring a person is going to cost me like 15x of what I pay you?"
Implementation: No ERP-Rollout Pain
Brody braced his team for the typical finance-tool rollout — and didn't get it:
"People in finance are always averse to implementation. They're used to ERP implementations and things taking longer than they actually take."
What it actually looked like:
"It was easy. We integrated Invoice Butler into our ERP. There were discussions over how to treat certain clients. Once we got the list and the information, we did some configuration over how we would approach different types of clients. And then, that was it."
"I remember very vividly telling Kyle, who works for me, You need to gauge this. If this takes you too much time, we'll just drop it.' And we didn't have to do that."
What Changed After Joining Invoice Butler
For Brody personally
The time he was burning on manual collections came back to him in hours per week:
"It is saving me at least two to three hours a week. That's essentially ROI right there, done immediately. You cost less than that."
Critically, those hours went into the work the company actually pays a Head of Finance to do:
"It's freeing me up to pay attention to the things that matter. What I want to do is look at our company performance, the KPIs we're tracking — whether it's in marketing, sales, or whatever — to figure out how to make our go-to-market better."
"Working with you was among a few different things I did to stop doing manual processes and start automating my business — at least the low-end tasks — so that I can then be the strategist I'm supposed to be."
For the business
In Brody's own words:
"You essentially take all of this manual work that I used to do, and you automate it for me. You take a significant amount of time sucked off of my hands and into yours, and you're much more successful at it because you're implementing an automated process to do it right."
What makes that automation actually work — and what auto-dunning misses — is that the outreach still feels personal:
"Even though you are doing automation, you're doing it in a way that makes the customer feel like it's a person. So they are answering. They're asking for more time. They're explaining what their issue is. They're acquiescing to the requests."
And the headline numerical result Brody calls out himself:
"I would say you cut my collections time. We were, on average, collecting on some of these 90-plus day outstanding bills in like a hundred days — and you got it under fifty."
The Results
ROI: Three Buckets
Invoice Butler pays off for Skyflow in three distinct ways:
1. Cash that would have come in anyway — but much faster. Average time-to-pay went from ~115 days to ~50. That's working capital that arrives more than two months earlier on every dollar.
2. Cash that would have eventually come in — but without burning the Head of Finance's hours. Those 2–3 hours per week now compound into strategic work: GTM, KPIs, infrastructure.
3. Cash that wouldn't have come in at all. 16 bounced contacts identified, 26 new contacts added — invoices that would have aged out into write-offs because the original contact had left or the domain had stopped working.
And the qualitative ROI Brody keeps returning to:
Skyflow's Finance Philosophy: Be the Strategist You're Supposed to Be
The thread tying everything together — and the reason Skyflow chose AI-powered automation over hiring — is a clear philosophy about what a small finance team should and shouldn't be doing.
"Stop doing manual processes and start automating your business — at least the low-end tasks — so that you can then be the strategist you're supposed to be."
For finance leaders making the same tradeoff at the same stage, Brody's read is direct: collections is one of the most automatable, lowest-leverage parts of the job. It shouldn't be eating two to three hours of your week. Put a system on it — one that still feels like a human reaching out — and reinvest that time in the work only you can do.