Alaan

This month marks an exciting milestone for Alaan – the launch of Alaan Intelligence or AI (alaan.com/intelligence). With Alaan Intelligence, we aim to revolutionize the way businesses manage their finances. Traditional finance teams spend days each month on manual tasks such as verifying receipts, extracting VAT-related data, and completing accounting entries for each expense. With AI, people can do all this without doing it (see video to know how). Currently, our AI processes over 50,000 receipts monthly, with an 80% auto-verification rate (no manual checking required). For a business with 500 receipts and 1-minute verification/receipt, it saves an entire workday! This is just the beginning. We have an entire team led by Amitesh Maheshwari and Yashjeet Luthra dedicated to getting rid of busy work for finance teams and generating insights to help reduce spend. I'm glad we're building in this era of AI - which makes all of the above possible. The world of tech has never been more exciting. Stay tuned.

What do you say when someone asks you to do repetitive tasks at work? 🤔 . . . . AI, AI captain! 💁♀️

Internally, Milica (MILL-its-uh) is known for her infectious smile, overused hedgehog emoji 🦔 , and the famous Frida Kahlo t-shirt. Outside, she is known for her perseverance, with which she introduces Alaan to businesses. Recently, Milica completed her first three months with us and wrote a post about her journey. It's raw, real, and heartfelt – just like you'd expect from a literature grad. ✍ Read it here 👉 https://lnkd.in/g9BxJUft

Last month, we hosted an evening of conversation, food, and chAI with our customers. Karak chai 🍵 is a universally loved drink in our region, and AI ✨ is revolutionizing how finance teams operate. So, we decided to combine them both. We were honored to have AVK Rao, Group Director of Finance at Rove Hotels, join us for a fireside chat. His insights into leveraging AI and tech to streamline finance processes left everyone inspired. A big thank you to all who joined us. We are planning our next chai event in August. Follow Alaan for more details. #chAIwithAlaan

Setting up one business is hard enough, but the brilliant team at Smart Zone® - The Business Setup Specialists helps set up many businesses every month. When you have so many businesses under your wing, things can get a little chaotic. That's what the finance team at Smart Zone struggled with—consolidating everything in one place so they could see the bigger picture. It is where we came in. We put together everything on dashboards so the team can see everything without having to see everything.  Read more here –> https://lnkd.in/gSqbsknX

Not every day do we hear AI and rigs in the same sentence, but Youssef Salem is changing that narrative. A visionary leader, Youssef uses data to anticipate trends before anyone else and prepares his team for the future. As a part of our CFO Series, we sat down with Youssef to talk about AI in finance and business and its impact in the Middle East. Read it here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gZfDnxiT About Youssef Youssef Salem is the CFO of ADNOC Drilling, the world's largest integrated driller, and has previously served as CFO of AIQ and Swvl. Youssef has over 13 years of investment banking experience, executing more than $100bn of capital raises, financings, M&A, and restructurings. He is a CFA Charterholder and was named a Forbes Middle East 30 under 30. Additionally, he is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Hub71 and an Adjunct Professor at the American University in Cairo.

This week, I will be completing six months at Alaan 🚀 and as I look back at the journey, I can confirm why they say the things they say: ☑ Make things people want > make people want things. Sales become at least 5x easier when you have a great product. All you need to do is communicate it well. ☑ Hire people who are hungry for learning. We’ve hired people from different markets and backgrounds, all outside a conventional checklist. We have a few hires in the sales team who had no background in sales and it has worked out so well. ☑ Automate everything you can and then automate some more. Investing in the right tools is extremely important and I find our tech toolkit to be very helpful in saving us time and unnecessary manual work. It’s been six months already but everyday is day 1 when it comes to learning something new 💡 Looking forward to many more milestones here!

Corporate tax got you saying, "Huh?" 🤔 This glossary might get you saying, "Uh-huh! Read on to know more about key terms associated with tax in the UAE.  

Alaan’s new office in Bangalore is open! 🩵🚀 Alaan began during the COVID era, so we embraced a remote-first culture. However, we always knew a hybrid setup was critical for creating the rapid learning loops essential for our young and hungry team. Velocity is everything.

Exciting news this week! Alaan has been ranked #1 for Usability in Payments by G2, based on customer ratings! It is an incredible honour to be recognized alongside industry giants like Apple, PayPal, Stripe and several more. Are we doing everything perfectly? Probably not, but here are 3 things that I feel are crucial to our high ratings for 'ease of use': 1. The Customer Success and Experience Teams keep their ears to the ground and tell us about every pain point (big or small) that customers face. If our product team deprioritizes an issue, they make it heard. Thanks Sharib Khalid António Mourão and teams for genuinely being the voice of our customers 2. The Product team is bombarded with various sources of input - from our CEO, from me, from our sales team, our customer facing teams, and from our usage data. Amitesh Maheshwari and the product team asks the deeper WHY questions, gets to the root of things, and prioritizes with a relentless focus on what will truly move the needle for the customer. 3. Finally, the design and tech teams: Balancing a feature-rich product with ease of use is a challenge. We have endless design sessions to ensure that each new feature doesn't overwhelm the user. Our tech team patiently refines/reworks various aspects - even after the nth iteration, knowing it enhances the customer experience. Huge shout out to all my colleagues at Alaan. This is the recognition we live for.