Skip to content

Discogs - Onboarding Kickoff - 2025-03-25

Metadata

  • Date: 2025-03-25
  • Company: Discogs
  • External Participants: Phil Blazey (VP Finance), Jamie McKinstry (Controller), Stephanie Burns (Senior Accounting Specialist)
  • Palm Participants: Gurjit Pannu, Emma Sjöström, Jennifer Pearson
  • Type: Customer Call
  • Domain Areas: Cash Forecasting, Cash Visibility, Reporting

Summary

Context

Onboarding kickoff call with Discogs, a new Palm customer. This is the first formal session to introduce the team, align on goals, outline the onboarding process, and establish working rhythms. Discogs is a company with a healthy balance sheet and cash reserves looking to improve their cash management capabilities.

Key Discussion Points

  • Team introductions: Emma introduced as product lead; Discogs team - Phil (VP Finance, strategic oversight), Jamie (Controller, reviewer/strategic), Stephanie (Senior Accounting Specialist, day-to-day operations)
  • Current state: Cash management tends to be reactive; reporting is very manual; limited forward-looking visibility
  • Goals alignment: Automation, proactive cash management, improved reporting, reduced human error
  • Onboarding timeline: Aim to go live within one month
  • Process overview: Two pillars - data (bank accounts, entities, categories, historical statements) and knowledge (workshops, learning sessions)
  • Collaboration setup: Slack channel, weekly check-ins (Wednesdays preferred), Notion workspace

Pain Points

  • Cash management is reactive rather than proactive
  • Reporting processes are very manual
  • Human error risk in current processes
  • Limited visibility into future cash needs
  • Haven't needed deep cash forecasting yet but anticipate needing it as business evolves

Feature Requests & Needs

  • Automated reporting to reduce manual work
  • Proactive cash forecasting to enable strategic decisions
  • Error flagging to catch items that might be missed
  • Support for FX strategies and investment optimization

Jobs & Desired Outcomes

Job: Manage cash proactively to support business decisions and optimize returns

Desired Outcomes: - Minimize the time required to produce financial reports - Reduce the frequency of human errors in data entry and review - Increase the ability to anticipate cash needs before they become urgent - Increase confidence in the accuracy of cash data

Domain Insights

  • Healthy balance sheet: Discogs has been in a fortunate position with good cash reserves
  • Investment opportunity: Interest rates are decent; want to consolidate operating cash into money markets and investment instruments
  • Future needs: Potential investments and distributions will require closer cash management
  • Org structure: Jamie is reviewer/strategic, Stephanie handles day-to-day operations, Phil receives escalations

Action Items

  • [ ] Gurjit to send Slack channel invite
  • [ ] Gurjit to send Notion workspace access
  • [ ] Gurjit to send data template for bank accounts, entities, categories
  • [ ] Discogs team to provide historical bank statements
  • [ ] Schedule weekly check-ins (Wednesdays work well)
  • [ ] Jen and Gurjit to do 1:1 walkthrough of data template

Notable Quotes

"Another big thing is just reducing human error. Because it's nice to feel good about it, like the accuracy of the data." - Jamie McKinstry

"We've been in quite fortunate position with a very healthy balance sheet and you know, sat on decent cash reserves for a little while. So we've not had to look at cash forecasting too much depth recently but you know that can and will change." - Phil Blazey

Full Transcript

00:00 Gurjit Pannu: Yeah, good good to see you all again. It feels. I was actually looking back at the notes. I can't believe it's been actually two months since we last spoke. Things move quick and slow at the same time. I don't know how that works, but

00:00 Phil Blazey: yes, companies nearly Q2

00:00 Gurjit Pannu: definitely feels that way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly a lot of changes since the last one, right? Jen.

00:08 Jennifer Pearson: He?

00:12 Phil Blazey: Plus time moving for you Jen.

00:14 Jennifer Pearson: Yeah, the days along the week's show.

00:16 Gurjit Pannu: That. Thanks for making the time, super excited for this. I know we have about 25 minutes, so don't mean to jump right into it, but I think we should jump right

00:25 Jamie McKinstry: Okay.

00:28 Gurjit Pannu: into it a few things to cover. I think. First and foremost, I'd love to introduce you all to Emma on our team. She leads our product at at Palm, someone that you'll get to know over over over this relationship, leading efforts around development speaking, to our customers, understanding the needs and challenges and kind of taking those back to help build an informed product.

00:51 Gurjit Pannu: But we'll do those reductions on in this presentation. Christian. Unfortunately the co-founder he was unable to make it, he's been under the weather feel like it's going on around Europe like a lot of folks

01:01 Jamie McKinstry: Yeah.

01:04 Gurjit Pannu: getting sick so he senses hellos and we'll introduce them in the time that comes with that, I'm gonna go ahead and present my screen but before we start any questions or anything that I could help answer beforehand, Nope. Okay, cool. And I think we should be able to cover all of this stuff.

01:24 Gurjit Pannu: If there are any questions in this presentation as well. So let me just actually share my screen. Don't know what happens. Sound like me to share one second. There it is. Okay, and you're able to see the screen folks.

01:39 Jennifer Pearson: Yep.

01:40 Gurjit Pannu: Awesome, cool. So yeah, first and foremost Thank you all for the opportunity as you've mentioned. In the emails, I think this is going to be a really nice partnership in which we're gonna hopefully be able to unlock some efficiency on your end and helps awesome. The challenges that you're all seeing.

01:56 Gurjit Pannu: And in return, we're getting opportunity to get really solid user feedback as we continue to build, build the palm platform in terms of the agenda today, as you can just spend a few minutes to just introduce mostly Emma and let her kind of get a couple of words in around her thoughts around this, this relationship and kind of what she does and what she kind of looks to take it out of it as we proceed.

02:20 Gurjit Pannu: I'll spend a few minutes around just onboarding what that looks like. The goals and some of the things that we've heard a little small mini exercise there around what your goals are. And and then the rest of the time will be around just kind of like, How do we, how does this, how do we progress in terms of racial? How do we work together? And then also saving some time for any Q&A and then also what what the next steps are.

02:46 Gurjit Pannu: And so should be, should be efficient and quick, and what we should make it in the in the time a lot it. So I'll keep on moving. So first of all, you guys know me we've already met. But in terms of How do we interact? I will be your main point of contact as we work through the onboarding and then post go live as well.

03:07 Gurjit Pannu: And we'll touch on a little bit about that afterwards and Christian, who's not here? He typically will be on the supporting side. So within the team, he manages our product and engineering side. And so usually, he and I are kind of behind the scenes linking in terms of what I'm hearing with art, what the folks that were working with, and how does that translate into some of the development and roadmapping as well.

03:30 Gurjit Pannu: But again I'll introduce him and when he's when he's back to 100%. But Emma let me let me bump it over to you. Maybe a quick introduction, your role and how you'll be interacting with the team would be great.

03:44 Emma Sjöström: Also nice meeting. You all finally, It's, it's something. I'm looking forward to a lot. I joined Palm as a software engineer and that's my background. My background is across business and software engineering. So I'm really, really leaning quite, you know, a lot into the tech side of things and I'm super excited about the tech that we're building and I'm equally excited about talking to you guys understanding like deeply your challenges, what like your magical one wishes would be if a system could just solve those for you.

04:20 Emma Sjöström: So my role is to be you know, mindful listening in asking you guys question learning as much as I can, which is something again, appreciate a lot and then taking that back to the team and applying that like collective wisdom and knowledge and intelligence and just trying to solve solve these pains for For you and our other customers as well.

04:45 Emma Sjöström: And always happy to, you know, answer any questions or yeah, anything like that. So always available.

04:53 Gurjit Pannu: So, thanks Emma and team, discogs. I think you would be great if you could. Maybe share a few lines in terms of your kind of rules and responsibilities to the Emma's. Also, informed. And and knows who to reach out to talk to if there's a questions that you may have,

05:10 Phil Blazey: And go first. Yeah, and Phil blazey VP of finance and international operations I'm based in London.

05:17 Emma Sjöström: Nice, thank you.

05:20 Jamie McKinstry: Hi, I'm Jamie and I'm the controller here. A goal is hopefully not have Phil in this too much, just for context. Stephanie and I will mainly be leading it probably with a lot of jugs help.

05:33 Emma Sjöström: All right. Thank you.

05:37 Stephanie Burns: I'm Stephanie, I'm the senior accounting specialist so more like doing the actual work and I'm based in Portland Oregon.

05:49 Emma Sjöström: All right, cool. Yeah, and thank you. And I'm based in Stockholm. I forgot to mention that.

05:55 Gurjit Pannu: Awesome, thanks team and then Jen maybe just a few words around Kenneth how do we see you fitting in in the team as well? And obviously we're very well connected but just to kind of set the Set the kind of rules and responsibilities.

06:08 Jennifer Pearson: Yeah, I guess so. My wallet poem is and I work a bit with Emma and a bit with Goji in terms of 12 from the product. In Conjunctionable with Discogs is and helping themselves the Treasury processes. So, we've got some in place but we're sort of I don't maybe halfway through the stuff that we plan to do.

06:26 Jennifer Pearson: And so I think my role here is to Try and replace some of the processes that we important to discuss with the platform while also given the product feedback to Emma and Goji. And also, You know, the feedback in terms of the onboarding process especially, you know, this called the the documents stuff that we have to fill in, you know, is there a way that those can be streamlined? And you know I'll get the feedback from Jamie and Stephanie as well as we're going through in terms of young coordinate that with Emma.

00:00 :

06:57 Gurjit Pannu: Awesome. Thanks, Jen. And thanks for wearing the multiple rolls. You got to figure out to get an AI version of in here. So then there's like the Palm Jen. And this is Discogs, Jen, it's joining these calls Awesome. Thank you, folks. Thanks for the introductions. And I think that's a good segue actually into into the next piece around kind of sharing what we heard from our last call, and our understanding of how things are at discogs.

07:20 Gurjit Pannu: And then there's a little bit of nexus, I kind of want to hear from you directly. Maybe one line each around What does success in this partnership look like for you. So in terms of at least what we've heard, right? So what you just mentioned is there's there's process that's been implemented but there is an opportunity to automate some of that or a big chunk of that things around, even cash management tend to be kind of reactive at the moment and so you know, with an opportunity to forecast and see Coming across, it allows the team to be more proactive and that's kind of the vision.

07:52 Gurjit Pannu: And we have in the product that we're building is not necessarily just playing back to you, what's happened across your business, but rather how to prepare for what's coming across in in the future, especially when it comes to cash, we also heard about reporting, right? Very manual at the moment.

08:07 Gurjit Pannu: And that is again, one of the core features that we're really happy about is how we build out the reporting functionality. We want to get to a place where again, it's proactive. It's easy to use easy to adjust and as automated as possible. I think maybe feel for you really important, right? And you tend to be, I would imagine the recipient of a lot of this financial reporting for you to be able to kind of take that in and and leverage it properly and and trust the data that's coming across and then I think as we talk about this proactive cash, management, peace and the reporting side, what it can unlock for us.

08:42 Gurjit Pannu: I think, or for discogs, in the future is one is to get more advanced in some of the effect strategies that you're looking. Implementing news. And then also interest rates are still pretty decent. And so, how can we we take advantage of those with being more efficient on the cash? Let's not park it in, in a bunch of operating accounts, but rather consolidated, it where you can, then invest it into into these money markets and whatever investment instruments, you have.

09:06 Gurjit Pannu: Does that sound about right? Is there anything that I might have missed? Opening that up to you.

09:13 Jamie McKinstry: I mean, I think another big thing is just reducing human error. Because it's nice to feel good about it, like the accuracy of the data.

09:23 Gurjit Pannu: There we go. You can add that in life. I think on that. No, maybe Jamie you could start, I'd love to. I'd love to hear from you. If we look at this a year from now and this partnership, what would you consider a success if we get there at the end of the year?

09:43 Jamie McKinstry: Um, well speeding up in process, reducing the human error. Like we talked about flagging items that we might miss, just because you know, From my perspective, I'm more of a reviewer and I'm wanting to be able to bring things to people's attention as quickly as possible. And I'm human sometimes that's not perfect and being able to break predict that because we just don't

10:00 Gurjit Pannu: Yeah.

10:04 Jamie McKinstry: look at that far in the future either. So being able to provide data to upper

10:07 Gurjit Pannu: Hmm awesome. So sped up execution automation better maybe better insights I

10:09 Jamie McKinstry: management as quickly as possible to make decisions and Is another piece.

10:20 Gurjit Pannu: think might be

10:21 Jamie McKinstry: Yeah.

10:22 Gurjit Pannu: Yeah cool. Awesome. Thank you. Stephanie.

10:30 Stephanie Burns: And I'm excited to see, you know, how our cash can grow with this. You know, we have our earnings, some return in our current setup, but I'm interested to see how this goes

10:47 Gurjit Pannu: Awesome, awesome. So, cash optimization. That's a Very near and dear to us as well. And Phil love to hear from you as well.

10:58 Phil Blazey: I think all of the above really, You know, we've been in quite fortunate position with a very healthy balance sheet and you know, sat on decent cash reserves for a little while. So we've not had to like look at Castro forecasting too and too much depth recently but you

11:10 Gurjit Pannu: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. It lines up. Well, with the way that we try to

11:14 Phil Blazey: know that that can and will change. I'm sure you know we'll be looking to make investments you know there's possibility of distribution so we will have this need as we go forward to to have a you know, a closer handle on cash. So yeah, really looking forward to seeing seeing how this tool works and yeah, any insights that we can get from it.

00:00 :

11:37 Gurjit Pannu: think about the value proposition of the app and then we talked about this in our intro call. So thank you for sharing. I always find this interesting where a year from now. I'll put it in a reminder to look at this. And we can come back and say, where we successful or Hey, we were successful.

11:55 Gurjit Pannu: That's all I'm gonna say. I don't think we need to unsuccessful but thanks. Thanks for sharing and I think we are all aligned around. What what success looks like I would say it's the same for us across these three for outcomes for you. And you know for me if you ask like What do I consider success and if Paul Mens are being a tool where it's a part of your day to day, it's your reliable kind of sidekick for cash and you know that you can go in there and get the insights that you need, you're able to see the execution that needs to happen.

12:27 Gurjit Pannu: I think for me that would be super super successful and in order to get that I think that's those are the three bullets that we need to achieve in order to take it to a place where I think both Paul and Discogs, see success. So awesome. Thank you very much.

12:43 Gurjit Pannu: um, So let's get into the meat of it, right? So what does onboarding look like our goal is to get you into the platform and using it as soon as possible. And in terms of when we think about onboarding, there's kind of two, two kind of pillars that the process sits in one is the data, which is actually taking the information and getting it into the platform.

13:03 Gurjit Pannu: And the bigger one is actually knowledge. So as I mentioned previously and we try to make this as light lift as possible, a lot of other systems require quite a bit of data back and forth and a lot of heavy lifting from the customer side. What we want to do is make the onboarding feel like almost a conversation in which we talk about your business.

13:23 Gurjit Pannu: We talk about kind of the Requirements and have some data needs, of course. But ideally a lot of these this knowledge sharing is actually just workshops and just kind of getting on a call and talking through what what outcomes we're trying to achieve. I'm not sure if my things block and remove this out of the way.

13:41 Gurjit Pannu: Sorry. So in terms of if we look at the timeline, we would love to get you live within a month. And so where where things stand is, the data setups is the first piece, this is just getting an idea around your bank accounts, your entities, the activity that's flowing through flowing through your accounts and then the categories of which make up the activity, what we'll do after this call, while she sends a template across that you can just fill out.

14:06 Gurjit Pannu: And we'll have a follow-up session where we can walk through how to do that. Jen should be super familiar with what the information, how it kind of translates into the app. So I don't anticipate this being too challenging. Where things tend to kind of get held up is getting some of the historical information and if it's not readily available, so things like bank statements.

14:25 Gurjit Pannu: And the reason for that is that no reason we need we would prefer to have as much of that as possible is it informs. Our machine learning models to kind of build your first cash forecast, it tries to look for a kind of trends and seasonality across the business within each category.

14:41 Gurjit Pannu: Didn't say Here's a Here's the first view of what we think your cash is going to be and then we lay on other inputs over time. So just calling out depending on how quickly we can get that data and digest. It is typically where the Where a lot of the kind of time tends to be in terms of extending out the go live.

15:01 Gurjit Pannu: But once we have the data, that's when we start kicking off some of our workshops where we'll have discussions around, understanding just a business model and how money moves through your through your, through your business, understanding any sort of intercompany relationships. If there are any any sort of flows that are recurring, just basically becoming like a, maybe a junior analyst that's coming in and you're teaching them the ropes of the finance function within within discogs and then we'll have more workshops around category and and how do we want to set up reports? But this is a very much a high level view.

15:33 Gurjit Pannu: We aim to get this done within the month. And yeah, it typically works pretty well if we just get about an hour a week, to kind of, at least most of the time, an hour. So we just have these these learning sessions typically Any any questions on this process? Or are these steps that we'll be taking?

15:53 Jamie McKinstry: Nope, and I think we have done a pretty good job of keeping our bank statements. Filed well, very organized. Hopefully we should be able to get those too

15:59 Gurjit Pannu: Awesome.

16:01 Jamie McKinstry: quickly.

16:02 Gurjit Pannu: Cool. That's great. That's great. And then in terms of kind of just responsibilities as well on the actual onboarding and I think Gen you're leading from like the Treasury view side of things and Jamie and Stephanie think you're kind of the day-to-day as well. How do we, How do we think about this from? And who's responsible for what from kind of a day-to-day, maybe from a strategy perspective and kind of outcomes driven kind of a view with that, would that be all right? I mean, I'll open up to you.

16:34 Gurjit Pannu: Like who, how do you kind of see this

16:36 Jamie McKinstry: Yes.

16:37 Gurjit Pannu: integral responsibilities?

16:39 Jamie McKinstry: I would say Stephanie's more the date today and then be more of like the

16:42 Gurjit Pannu: Okay.

16:44 Jamie McKinstry: reviewer thinking strategically, and then you can eating anything over that's urgent or needed to fill.

16:53 Gurjit Pannu: Okay, cool.

16:54 Jamie McKinstry: so, Probably me is the main. Point of contact to own it with leaning on Stephanie, quite a bit throughout

17:00 Gurjit Pannu: Okay.

17:03 Jamie McKinstry: this as well.

17:05 Gurjit Pannu: Perfect. Well aligned. And that's noted. And we'll definitely keep a note of that as well as we move forward. Awesome, in terms of then how do we all work together? This kind of three different pieces that three different places where you'll see us interact, quite often. First and foremost, we'll set up a slack channel.

17:22 Gurjit Pannu: I checked with gender just sound like years around slack, and so should be pretty straightforward to get you, get you into that piece. That's fact. Channel is where you provide feedback or questions for support, anything that's kind of top of mind, feel free to drop it in there. And what we actually say to our customers is Nothing is too small, nothing is too big.

17:43 Gurjit Pannu: It's a great place to just get information in there for us to then triage internally. If we need to have someone else involved, we can definitely do. That, but that's that channel is where, where things happen, that's where the conversations are had, so we'll definitely send that across. Next up, is a weekly check-in, so we'd like to have a placeholder 30 minutes at a time.

18:04 Gurjit Pannu: That's convenient for you. It's typically me that joins those, the point of those, especially during onboarding is to just kind of keep things moving and can provide updates do pulse checks on our things moving as fast as you want, or the too slow or is there something that's stuck? It's just an opportunity to then just kind of have more of an open conversation versus you know sometimes like it might not feel like the right place whereas on the check in it's it's easier to just communicate and just have a conversation and that's kind of what we see in those.

18:36 Gurjit Pannu: And then have you all used notion before are you familiar with notion?

18:43 Phil Blazey: This, there's a third time in a week that I've heard notion and I never heard of it until then. So now this is like it's time to definitely go and check it out.

18:50 Gurjit Pannu: Okay. Sounds good. I Yeah, those shouldn't notion is great. I'm a fan. It's if you're familiar with like Atlassians and those types of knowledge knowledge, sharing spaces, notion is one of those actually it's just what we find is it's very easy to use. It doesn't take that long to learn it's just basically I can open.

19:07 Gurjit Pannu: Formattable page that you could build things around. Keep notes in, we use it internally as a company as well, but we also create them what, our customers and typically what we put in there and you'll see this when I share it is project notes recordings of our calls. If there's any documents that we're sharing, we could kind of put those in there.

19:25 Gurjit Pannu: But think of it, as the brain behind all of this where there's a system of documentation record that you can always refer to and as you go, it's a great place where we sometimes have our Especially with some customers where we have a couple of open items that we want to track, they're gonna take a while to kind of to complete.

19:43 Gurjit Pannu: It's a great place to kind of just track kind of statuses as well. You'll see it, we could we can walk through in our next check-in, just kind of how to how to use it, but it's fairly intuitive. And we haven't really heard too much from folks that that it's hard to pick up so Phil you might get hooked to it and then all of a sudden, you'll be asking people.

20:04 Gurjit Pannu: Hey, have you ever heard of notion? We love to use it with you, so I'll share that as well afterwards. And if you, if you need a bit of a 101, happy to happy to do that as well. Any questions here, anything I can answer around the working with Palm

20:22 Jamie McKinstry: The date or the, in the time, for the weekly check-in is there. A time that works best. I know we're the time difference is a little difficult on your end.

20:34 Gurjit Pannu: Yeah. Yeah. If yeah, you know, whatever works for you. I think we just share a calendar like, share link to my calendar and you'll see an opening. We can we can just do it from there and Reflexible, right? So if, if a certain date doesn't work in a week or certain time, we can definitely move things around the goal for it's, it's more.

20:53 Gurjit Pannu: So we're very flexible and so if yeah, whatever works well for you, and if it's a moving check-in, we can do that. Sometimes. Customers choose, they want to skip one if things are all going well. So again, happy happy to play it by ear. And allow you to kind of let us know what's what's working tomorrow for you.

00:00 :

21:10 Jamie McKinstry: Okay maybe it's more my issue Wednesdays. I think have been working well for Jen

21:13 Gurjit Pannu: Okay.

21:18 Jamie McKinstry: and I in the past because it's like our drop off wall Jenna. I know you're trying to changing probably and

21:27 Jennifer Pearson: And I guess, yes or no, I'm kindly all the time and none of the time at the same

21:29 Jamie McKinstry: Okay.

21:32 Jennifer Pearson: time.

21:35 Jamie McKinstry: oh yeah, if you want to send me a link for

21:35 Gurjit Pannu: Yeah I'll send the link and then feel free to book it and then we'll take it

21:38 Jamie McKinstry: With.

21:41 Gurjit Pannu: from there and again super flexible and you know we're on slack And so if you

21:44 Jamie McKinstry: Okay.

21:45 Gurjit Pannu: say Hey can't make this week we have we have another customer that we've changed it to buy weekly actually. So again what whatever makes sense, we're happy to happy to accommodate.

21:56 Jamie McKinstry: Okay, thank you.

21:58 Gurjit Pannu: Cool. And and then finally, just next step. So what's what's happening in the next couple of days? You'll see an invite Come from me. And I think I'll send this is Jamie and Stephanie and I feel you want to be involved in the slack. And then we'll also share the notion environment.

22:15 Gurjit Pannu: So he kind of play around and have that set up and I'll send over the data template over to you all. And I also think with Jen, I think it's probably do it just one-on-one, Jen, just to go through through that template, just to just so that you're aware on a time for networks for us.

22:32 Gurjit Pannu: And then the the providing of the historical data set. So the bank statements is what we'll need to start with. And so, in terms of, If we think about cadence, it's in this order, you'll see it invites come across by tomorrow, the template will come across by tomorrow, and then a little bit of an explainer on how to kind of share the historical historical bank statements and then Yeah, then we're off to the races.

22:56 Gurjit Pannu: Then it's, we're officially kicked off onboarding and and we'll get you Live in the next month.

23:03 Jamie McKinstry: Hey, I'm so excited.

23:05 Gurjit Pannu: Yeah, same same very much. So like I said, already, we're very thankful for you. All given us the opportunity. And I think there's some cool stuff coming around the corner for all of us and really appreciate it.

23:19 Jennifer Pearson: It's just on time.

23:20 Gurjit Pannu: Just on time, I told you I'd be efficient if there's nothing else, then we will

23:21 Jamie McKinstry: Yeah.

23:23 Phil Blazey: Yes.

23:25 Gurjit Pannu: chat soon, I'll send out some of these things by tomorrow my morning and we'll take it from there folks.

23:32 Jennifer Pearson: Thank you.

23:32 Jamie McKinstry: Welcome to Paul. Okay. See you all.

23:34 Phil Blazey: Thank you.

23:35 Emma Sjöström: Nice.

23:36 Jamie McKinstry: Appreciate.

23:37 Gurjit Pannu: but,