Webflow Customer Story

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Webflow: Efficient spend request process with mitigated risk

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Background Information

Spokespeople:

• Ivan Makarov, VP of Finance
• Simi Raina, Head of Legal‍

Industry: Software

Company size: 550+ employees

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

‍Tech Stack: NetSuite, Bill.com, Ramp, Whistic, Jira, Asana, DocuSign, Slack

Result from Zip:

• Operational efficiency with deferred cost of dedicated procurement team and decrease in approval cycle times‍
• Mitigated risk with 80% of non-headcount spend now under management in Zip

Webflow is a visual development platform that allows you to build websites without code. In early 2020, at around 150 employees, Webflow’s growth was picking up steam. The finance team needed to start scaling financial operations to keep pace. Ivan Makarov joined as VP of Finance and immediately got to work on how to efficiently scale the business.

Ivan knew from experience that Webflow needed a robust spend request process, but the problem was that the team had yet to build a dedicated procurement function.

Simi Raina joined the organization as Head of Legal in early 2021 as the first lawyer, with the charter to build out the legal team at Webflow. Simi joined forces with Ivan to build out an end-to-end process for vendor onboarding and spend requests that has scaled as the organization has grown to over 550 people.

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Webflow’s initiative: scale financial operations with efficiency

As Ivan and Simi evaluated the issues at hand, they found there were use cases that needed to be addressed spanning the intake process and ongoing vendor management.

Intake for NetSuite

Webflow was building out a tech stack to handle their growing scale and need for compliance. Part of that picture was having NetSuite in place for ERP. NetSuite maintains an official system of record for finance, however it is not generally accessible to all employees. Webflow needed a simple way to enable any employee to request a new vendor or put in a spend request, make the process less time consuming and require fewer specialized skills to create vendors and POs in NetSuite.

As Ivan states, “Before Zip it was very manual. Through Slack direct messages, I would get a request from somebody who needed to buy a new tool or needed to hire a contractor for a specific project. I would have to approve it, and I would have to spin up the manual process of getting it fully approved. In the early stages, we did not have legal, we did not have security or IT, so a lot of the things sat with me.”

Challenging approval coordination

As the organization grew, the approval chain became more complex. “Eventually we hired our first heads of legal, IT, security and risk and governance. The process became very manual, painful and slow. Sometimes the ball just got dropped at various stages of approval. It was a long and manual process that most people did not like.”

“The biggest thing we were trying to solve was speed to approval, but also to make sure that the proper diligence was done on all levels of approval, from different parties and at different stages.”

No centralized contract repository

At the same time Simi found additional challenges from the legal perspective. According to Simi, “There was no central contract repository. The amount of time and energy that was poured into trying to get things done when we weren't organized was significant, and it was not particularly scalable.”

Lack of visibility to upcoming contract negotiations

In addition, there were process issues impacting the legal team’s productivity. “There was no consistency behind when legal was going to be brought into the process.”

“More often than not, we would be told, ‘Hey, we have this agreement that's up for renewal tomorrow.’ With a very small legal team, it's difficult to review legal terms in a day. So we would often be stuck with terms that we didn't want, which were not very favorable to Webflow. Because there wasn't a formal process in place, we were stuck with whatever we ended up with.”

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Zip’s solution: an efficient spend request process with control and oversight

Webflow introduced Zip, and it had a massive impact on financial operations. Webflow now uses Zip in several ways. Ivan states, “We use Zip primarily for three things. We use it to handle approvals for new software or contractor spend. We use it to track the renewals, because these things typically have a recurring nature to them, and then we use it to expand. For example, we might initially buy a tool with 20 seats, and if we find that six months later we actually need 60 seats, we can use Zip to initiate the process and renegotiate the expansion. Zip ensures it gets proper approval by the proper parties.”

Streamlined collaboration with legal

With Zip, the legal team also saw a dramatic improvement in collaboration with stakeholders. As Simi notes, “Webflow’s legal team uses Zip for pretty much any type of spend related agreement. When the request goes through Zip, legal gets notified that we have a request for contract review, and then we use the platform to pass the drafts back and forth. We're able to see all of our status updates, communicate with internal stakeholders from within the platform, send out an agreement for execution, and store that agreement within Zip when it's all done.”

“From a scalability and efficiency standpoint, our internal purchasers have the ability to go in, check the status of their deals, and self-serve a lot better than they were able to previously. That frees up legal's time. It gives people visibility and a better experience when they're going through a purchase process with us.”

Vendor document management

In addition to collaboration with legal, Zip also provides one source of truth for documents for a vendor. As Simi states, “We have a process that is much more scalable and consistent, and provides much better visibility. We have a home for all of our vendor agreements. So whether we're working on a renewal, or we need to pull and view contract terms for another reason, we're able to quickly and easily access the agreements that we need to access. We also now have a very clean audit trail of drafts being passed back and forth because we do all of that within the platform itself.”

Triggering privacy reviews only when necessary

Zip automates compliance, ensuring the right reviews happen. According to Simi, “Legal has two separate workflows within Zip. One for your straightforward legal review and one for privacy review. We're able to do this by utilizing Zip's intake form. Internal purchasers, when uploading an agreement for review, are required to respond to several questions. Depending on how they answer those questions, privacy review may or may not be triggered. This is a really great feature because previously, privacy review would be something that we'd have to consider for all deals. And that doesn't always make sense. When we use Zip for intake, we're really only triggering that review when it's actually required.

Cross-functional visibility and collaboration

“I would say that the team's favorite aspect of it is the visibility that you get within Zip. The reviewers as well as the requesters, the purchasers, are all able to see the same thing within Zip. So you can track exactly where a deal is, what the potential bottleneck is. If somebody wants a status update, they don't have to go through legal, or frankly any other team at this point, because they can just log into Zip and say, ‘Okay, it's with security. Okay, it's with privacy.’ Review has been initiated, review has not been initiated. That level of visibility really helps to streamline things and make us more efficient.

“Another feature that our team really likes is the comment tree, which basically allows you to look back and see the entire history of the comments and communications that have been made about a particular deal. If somebody on the team is out and you're filling in for them, you can easily just go look up a deal in Zip, view the deal history, read through the comment tree and see exactly what has been discussed, and check what the status is.”

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Results: Operational efficiency and mitigated risk

Improved operational efficiency

Ivan quickly got operational leverage with Zip in place. “Zip allowed us to scale procurement before we hired our first procurement person to build the initial foundations of the process. Zip allows us to get through the process faster and to run things in parallel and around multiple buying processes, versus in the past the process was manual and handled only one approval at a time.”

“The direct impact is we went from things taking weeks to approve to where things can get done within a day or two, sometimes within a few hours when we have an urgent purchase that we need to make, and that was not possible prior to Zip."

Simi agrees, “We're saving a lot of time now that we have a more streamlined way to vet these processes and make sure that deals have been approved by the correct stakeholders. We no longer have to track people down to get that information because it's all in one convenient place.

Mitigated risk

The ability to have a clear audit trail and control over the spend process gives Ivan confidence in Webflow’s risk posture. “Since implementation of Zip, over 80% of our non-head count-related spend is now going through Zip. We can track it, we can improve it, and we have confidence around doing the due diligence on it. I'm the final approver. I can see what work has been done, who's already looked at it, and I get extra confidence that we've done our due diligence during the process.”

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The Zip Difference

No training required 

According to Ivan, “The thing that initially attracted us to Zip was how easy it was to use and to understand. Typically when it comes to new finance tools, you have to train your people. You have to learn how to use it yourself. There was no training required. We just started using Zip, and the user interface is very simple, much better than your average finance tool that tends to help the finance people, but doesn't help the other parties that have to use the tool. It's been built well.”

Speed of innovation

“The other thing that attracted us to Zip was that they had a very robust product velocity of how many new features they were shipping. They would tell us about something, and we would see that come to fruition in the next few months. It's a product that's innovating very fast, and has a lot of great features we're excited about.”

Slack integration

“We’re a company that does everything on Slack. We don't use email here very much. A lot of the other companies would use emails for approvals. Zip is highly integrated with Slack.”

“A lot of my approvals come in between meetings or in the after hours when I'm catching up with things on my phone. Because of the easy Slack integration, you can approve fast, see the stages and see what the open-ended questions are. With a few clicks, I can approve a complex expense, just by working through Slack. For a company that's highly engaged in Slack, something like that is the table stakes for us, and Zip has built a good integration and are working on improving that even further.”

Scales with you as you grow

“Before we on-boarded Zip, we had no official procurement function. We now have a procurement leader here, who loves using the product and loves expanding the usage of our product. We went from two or three people getting involved in the procurement process to six to ten, and we're going to have more.”

“As they build out the product, we are confident they will build it together with us and can support our growth over the next several years.”

Seamless onboarding

For Simi, the onboarding process was impressive, given Zip was founded in 2020. “The Zip onboarding process was seamless. Zip offered live training and office hours and the team was very available to us. The other thing that was unique to the Zip process was they were very open to feedback and they actually did something with it. There were numerous instances where we would request a product feature and explain why it would be helpful and why it was important to us, and Zip would actually go ahead and implement it, which was a great experience for us.”

“Onboarding with Zip was a straightforward process for us.” Ivan concurs. “Our teams were highly engaged on both ends and they got all the right stakeholders in place. They would ask for frequent feedback. They would implement our feedback. They built several custom workflows for us that were unique to our company and the way we want to think about approvals here.”

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Ready for the future

Simi has really valued how Zip has been able to help Webflow build a mature procurement process. “Zip has been a critical component of Webflow's ability to put together a scalable, structured, and mature procurement function.”

And Ivan believes the impact has positioned them well for due diligence going forward. “Since we implemented Zip, we can approve spend faster, we can approve it in parallel, and also, as a final approver, I have more confidence that we've done our due diligence during the process.”

“When I think of Zip, I think of accelerating things and I think of documentation. This is the best way we found in order for us to get through the process, but also to properly document everything.”

“We see ourselves scaling with Zip for a long time.”

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