From chaotic Stripe data to a Board-ready MRR waterfall in 30 days.
TechFlow Inc.
The Challenge
TechFlow is a Series A B2B SaaS company building construction technology in Toronto. When they came to APX, they were 18 months post-raise with 8 engineers and $2.4M ARR. Their previous bookkeeper was a solo practitioner who had been adequate at the seed stage but had fallen behind as the company scaled.
The problems were severe. Stripe payouts were being recorded as lump-sum bank deposits — there was no way to separate subscription revenue from one-time onboarding fees, and payment processor fees were buried in the deposit amounts. The MRR waterfall that their investors requested every quarter was being manually assembled in a Google Sheet by the founder, pulling numbers from the Stripe dashboard and guessing at the categorizations.
Even worse, TechFlow's engineering team had been solving genuinely novel computer vision problems — building algorithms to analyze construction site photos and detect safety violations — but they had never filed a SR&ED claim. Their entire engineering payroll was dumped into a single "Salaries & Wages" GL account with no project-level tracking, making it impossible to isolate qualifying R&D expenditures.
The APX Approach
The Solution
We deployed our full Fractional Controller + Bookkeeping package. The engagement had three phases.
Phase 1 — Revenue Recognition Overhaul (Weeks 1-2): We integrated Stripe directly into Xero using A2X, creating specialized clearing accounts that automatically separated gross subscription revenue, one-time setup fees, payment processor fees, refunds, and chargebacks. Each revenue stream flows into a distinct GL account. The MRR waterfall — new, expansion, contraction, churn — now calculates automatically from the GL data.
Phase 2 — SR&ED Readiness (Weeks 3-6): We restructured TechFlow's chart of accounts to include project-specific cost centres mapped to their Jira epics. Every developer's timesheet now allocates their salary proportionally across the projects they worked on. We interviewed the CTO to build the technical narratives documenting the technological uncertainties they had faced. We assembled the full SR&ED claim package including Form T661 and the supporting technical descriptions.
Phase 3 — Ongoing Operations: We now handle daily transaction categorization, bi-weekly payroll processing through Remote (they have 2 developers in Portugal), monthly bank reconciliations, GST/HST filings, and a monthly reporting package that includes the MRR waterfall, burn rate analysis, and updated runway projections. The founder receives this by the 10th business day of each month.
The Outcome
Within 45 days of engagement, TechFlow had a Board-ready monthly reporting package that their lead investor described as "the cleanest we've seen in our entire portfolio." The month-end close went from 25+ days to 3 business days.
Three months after engagement, the reconstructed SR&ED claim was filed with the CRA. The approved refund was $42,000 — a combination of refundable ITCs on qualifying labour expenditures and subcontractor costs for a machine learning consultant they had hired. This single credit covered the cost of APX's fractional services for the entire year.
The founder now spends zero time on financial administration and has real-time visibility into the company's financial health through a live Xero dashboard we built for them.
Want results like these?
Book a Discovery Call to see how we can optimize your finance stack.