From Spreadsheets to Digital CFO: Building Sherpa’s Automated Platform

Digital transformation has changed everything, yet there are still areas where small and medium businesses feel trapped in the past. Financial management is one of them: a critical process for strategic decision-making that, for many companies, still means endless spreadsheets, recurring errors, and repetitive tasks.

This is where Sherpa emerged, a fintech with an ambitious mission: make quality financial management accessible to any SME. To achieve this, they needed a tool that would eliminate dependence on manual spreadsheet processes and facilitate financial KPI visualization.

Our solution was to build a technology platform capable of automating, optimizing, and scaling their service. The result: a completely new way to manage finances, enabling SMEs to make strategic decisions in an agile, reliable, data-driven manner.

Making Financial Management Scalable and Accessible

99% of Spain’s business landscape consists of SMEs: companies with great potential that often face the same obstacle. Access to quality financial management services isn’t viable for many of them. Hiring a full-time Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is an unaffordable investment, leaving these companies at a clear disadvantage against larger competitors.

Sherpa decided to change this reality by offering outsourced, accessible, and affordable financial management services. But to do this, they needed a technology partner to help them build a custom tool to:

• Automate data processing: consolidate bank statements, integrate accounting information, and generate reports without relying on spreadsheets
• Generate dynamic, personalized reports: deliver clear, tailored reports to each client without consuming hours of manual work
• Manage projections and KPIs reliably: analyze data in real-time, minimize errors, and offer financial decisions based on solid information

The challenge was developing a platform capable of multiplying Sherpa’s capacity without increasing operational costs. The solution had to be iterative: start with a functional MVP that could grow and add new features as the company scaled.

This approach not only allowed for faster launch and value proposition validation, but also freed up resources to invest in innovation, creating a unique and differentiated product within the SME financial solutions ecosystem. The platform didn’t just solve immediate operational challenges—it was designed with scalability and long-term competitiveness in mind, offering small and medium businesses a level of financial management previously only available to large corporations.

Development Speed Without Compromising the Future

The mission was clear: build a robust, scalable, and flexible platform. Development speed was critical, but we couldn’t compromise the stability or evolution capacity of the product. Our strategy centered on a modular and pragmatic approach, selecting technologies that allowed us to iterate quickly without creating dependency on a single vendor.

The architecture’s core relied on a modern, efficient stack:

• Next.js and Vercel: Next.js enabled combining frontend and backend in a single environment, accelerating development and ensuring high performance. Vercel facilitated automatic deployments and optimized environments for rapid iteration.
• Supabase and PostgreSQL: Managed PostgreSQL database guaranteeing schema control and future migrations without vendor lock-in
• Specialized external services: Inngest orchestrated complex workflows, Mailersend managed emails and notifications, and Betterstack enabled real-time monitoring—critical functionalities implemented in days instead of months.

As the product matured and the client base grew, the initial Vercel infrastructure migrated to AWS, orchestrated with Terraform. This transition, planned from the start, executed without interruptions, guaranteeing the stability and scalability needed to support future growth. Every technology decision was made with one principle in mind: initial velocity without compromising the product’s stability or evolution capacity.

Tangible Value for Sherpa and Their Clients

Our main goal was creating an automated, reliable, and scalable system that would benefit not only Sherpa’s financial management team but also improve their SME clients’ experience.

Automation was the platform’s central pillar: it reduced Sherpa’s operational burden and minimized human errors, freeing up time to focus on strategic advisory. At the same time, Sherpa’s clients receive more accurate, updated, and accessible information.

Technical Challenges Overcome

Building the platform meant facing several technical challenges that could affect development speed, stability, and scalability:

• Efficient processing in a serverless environment: Vercel functions have limited timeout, requiring us to optimize memory and CPU usage, reduce code cyclomatic complexity, and avoid nested loops
• Separation of concerns in a monolith: we kept code clearly divided between frontend and backend, using React Queries on the frontend and secured endpoints on the backend, facilitating future decoupling and possible transition to microservices
• Avoiding vendor lock-in from the start: choosing Supabase as BaaS and PostgreSQL as relational database, along with Prisma as ORM, ensured data portability and future migrations to other cloud providers
• External service integration: Inngest for workflow orchestration, Mailersend for automated emails, and Betterstack for real-time monitoring, accelerating development without compromising quality or scalability

Applied Innovations

Platform development didn’t just solve complex technical challenges—it also incorporated innovations that guarantee the solution’s robustness, scalability, and usability. Orbitant combined execution speed with long-term vision, ensuring a differentiated product ready to grow with its clients.

• Modular and scalable architecture: each component can evolve independently, allowing functionality improvements and scaling without service interruption
• Iterative MVP: we launched a functional initial version that enabled quick feedback, iteration on key features, and prioritization of what truly added value for SMEs
• Infrastructure ready to scale: from Vercel to AWS with Terraform, eliminating serverless limitations and ensuring stability, monitoring, and exponential growth capacity
• User experience optimization: the frontend streamlines interaction while the backend centralizes and secures data, offering end clients an intuitive, reliable, and fast platform

Exponential Growth and Financial Democratization

The platform’s existence didn’t just optimize internal operations—it completely transformed Sherpa’s value proposition.

Growth and Profitability: ARR Multiplied by 5

The tool enabled Sherpa to scale their business exponentially.

• Operational burden per client decreased by over 60% thanks to manual task automation
• This efficiency increase enabled serving more clients without expanding the team
• The impact was direct: Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) grew 400%
• Reduced operational and commercial costs significantly improved margins per client

This model allowed reinvestment in product innovation and new client acquisition, ensuring sustainable and profitable growth over time.

Total Precision: Goodbye to Manual Errors

Migrating to automated processes eradicated the risks associated with Excel: unbalanced sheets, incorrect formulas, or incomplete reports became history.

• Reliable data in every projection: the platform automatically validated each cash flow, projection, and key KPI
• Instant, secure reports: dashboards and reports in seconds, offering a real-time view of financial health

Speed and Adaptability as Competitive Advantage

The modular solution and Orbitant team’s agility allow the platform to evolve continuously, incorporating improvements and new features almost daily.

• Immediate market adaptation: Sherpa can integrate changes and new capabilities ahead of competitors
• Reduced implementation times: any adjustment or improvement deploys in hours or days, not weeks
• Innovation as strategic advantage: development speed enables experimenting, testing, and validating high-impact business functionalities without disrupting operations

Thanks to this capability, Sherpa keeps their value proposition always updated and differentiated, consolidating their market position and ensuring the platform remains a key tool for scaling and optimizing the business.

Market Expansion: From Niche to Mainstream

Thanks to the platform, Sherpa could diversify plans and adjust pricing, offering financial management services to SMEs that previously couldn’t afford them. What started as a niche became a much broader market, consolidating Sherpa as an industry leader.

Simultaneously, the client experience took a qualitative leap: instant reports, interactive dashboards, and projections accessible anytime.

• Democratized access: small and medium businesses now enjoy automated tools and adjusted pricing previously exclusive to large corporations
• Financial empowerment: even users without experience can understand and use information thanks to clear graphics and intuitive visualizations
• Trust relationship: transparency and agility generated higher retention, positive reviews, and a more committed client base

Orbitant has enabled us to democratize financial advisory services. Thanks to automated reports and greater visibility into our KPIs, we’ve reduced our operational workload by 60%, allowing us to scale our financial services sustainably. We can now serve more clients while delivering maximum value.

BEATRIZ VILLAR
CFO de Sherpa

Technology Used

• Next.js – Full-stack framework
• Vercel – Initial deployment platform
• PostgreSQL – Database
• Supabase – Backend as a Service
• Prisma – ORM
• Inngest – Workflow orchestration
• Mailersend – Email and notification management
• Betterstack – Real-time monitoring
• AWS – Cloud infrastructure
• Terraform – Infrastructure as code