Nick Chandi

Forwardly - AI-powered AP/AR platform for growing businesses. I help businesses to get paid faster and better manage their vendor payments.

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

The accounts payable manager at a growing healthcare clinic was buried under a mountain of invoices from medical equipment suppliers on a Friday afternoon.

The clinic was processing 600 payouts every month. It used to take 30 days just to onboard a new vendor because they were chasing tax forms via unsecure email. Their finance team wasted hours manually keying data into Oracle NetSuite.

They fell right into the digitizing trap. They bought a shiny new accounts payable tool to digitize their workflow, but they did not fix the underlying broken process. Digitizing a bad process just gives you a faster bad process.

Vendor adoption friction became their biggest failure. They switched to a digital payment platform but failed to get their medical suppliers on board because they did not explain the security benefits. Suppliers resisted giving bank details and demanded paper checks.

Then the clinic changed its approach. They stopped asking vendors for routing numbers over email. They offered them a secure payment portal and framed it as a security upgrade to protect their data from business email compromise scams.

By deploying this strategy and connecting ledgers directly through the Forwardly Business Network, vendor onboarding slashed to 24 to 48 hours. They reduced manual data entry to zero via direct API connections.

If you manage finances for a healthcare clinic, here are concrete steps you can take today:

1. Before looking at software, map out your current approval routing on a whiteboard to identify bottlenecks.
2. Stop asking vendors for routing numbers over email and offer a secure portal instead.
3. Stop treating high volume accounts payable like a series of individual tasks and shift to single debit batching.

How are you handling vendor onboarding and secure payouts today?

#Healthcare #AccountsPayable #CashFlow

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

Managed Service Providers spend their days protecting clients from cyber threats. Yet when it comes to getting paid, MSP owners are still relying on unprotected email chains and slow paper checks.

You cannot sell cutting edge IT security and then ask your clients to pay via a loose PDF invoice. That is a security paradox. It delays your cash flow and makes you look outdated.

Stop digitizing a broken process. Here is your playbook to fix it:

1. Kill the PDF invoice. Move to a Secure Payment Portal where the client authenticates before paying.
2. Mandate auto pay for monthly retainer fees. Do not give clients the option to forget.
3. Separate hardware billing from service billing so large hardware costs do not bottleneck your recurring revenue.

What is the biggest bottleneck in your billing process today? Drop your thoughts below.

#MSP #AccountsReceivable #CashFlow

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

Founders obsess over optimizing their tech stack but completely ignore their mental stack.

Running a bootstrapped company is an exercise in managing chaos. You fight tight margins and massive venture funded competitors daily.

If you let that chaos live in your head, you will burn out.

Two to three times a week, I step away from the monitors and practice yoga. Surviving as a CEO requires extreme mental flexibility and the ability to breathe through high pressure.

When you are bootstrapped, you have no safety net. If you react to every late payment with panic, that panic becomes your company culture.

Yoga teaches me to hold uncomfortable positions and just breathe through them. That is the exact skill you need when a contract gets delayed or a launch hits a wall.

You cannot control the chaos of the market. You can only control your response.

What is your routine for maintaining mental clarity?

#Founders #Bootstrapped #Leadership

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

CFOs and Founders: digitizing a broken AP process just means you make mistakes faster.

The biggest operational pitfall I see is ignoring segregation of duties when scaling. You cannot have the same person creating the bill and approving the payment. It is a recipe for internal fraud.

Here is the playbook to fix this before you buy any software:

1. Map your approval tiers today. Determine exactly who approves under $5,000 and who approves over $10,000.
2. Implement two key segregation. The person who uploads the invoice must never be the person who clicks approve.
3. Standardize your payment timing. Stop paying bills the day they arrive. Pay them on Thursdays to stabilize your cash flow.

What is your take on this?

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

Most early stage founders know exactly how many users they have, but they cannot answer basic questions about their own survival.

If you cannot recite these four numbers instantly, you are flying blind:

1. Monthly Burn Rate.
How much cash is exiting your business every thirty days? Know the exact cost of keeping the lights on.
2. Break Even Point.
How much revenue do you need to collect just to hit zero? Do not celebrate deals that do not cover the floor.
3. Cash Runway.
If revenue stopped tomorrow, how many days can you make payroll with the cash in your account?
4. Effective Hourly Rate.
If you are working ninety hours a week for minimum wage, your pricing model is broken.

Do not run your business on vanity metrics. Survival comes down to the math.

Which of these four numbers do founders ignore the longest?

#Founders #Startups #FinancialLiteracy

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

The payroll deadline was exactly three hours away, and the staffing agency CEO was staring at a $150,000 shortfall to pay their temporary IT contractors.

Staffing firm founders and operational leaders know this exact panic. The issue was never a lack of revenue. The issue was that three massive corporate clients decided to treat their Net 30 payment terms as a mere suggestion.

When you run a mid sized staffing or recruiting agency, cash flow is not just a secondary accounting metric. It is the literal oxygen that keeps your contractors showing up to work. The gap between billing a corporate client and actually receiving the cleared funds can easily stretch to 45 or 60 days. But your contractors expect to be paid on Friday, period.

If you are relying on manual invoicing and hoping a paper check arrives in the mail, you are basically financing your clients operations for free. That is a highly dangerous game to play when staffing margins are tight and economic conditions are shifting.

Instead of waiting and hoping, agencies need to take aggressive control of their Accounts Receivable immediately.

First, implement a Secure Payment Portal on every single invoice you send out. Make it completely frictionless for your clients to pay you the exact second they approve the weekly timesheets.
Second, mandate digital payments for any corporate client invoice over ten thousand dollars. Stop accepting the excuse that a check is lost in transit.

Third, synchronize your payment data directly with your ledger so your finance team knows your exact cash position in real time.

Cash flow automation is not just about saving administrative time. It is about making sure the money is sitting in your bank account before your own payroll run hits.

Are you still allowing your biggest clients to dictate when you get paid, or have you completely taken control of your collections process? What is your take?

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

To every bootstrapped founder and CEO out there building something from nothing.
People think the goal of leadership is to make your life easier as you scale.

That is completely backwards.

Every morning, I go for a one hour walk wearing a heavy weighted vest. It is uncomfortable. It makes every step harder. But it builds the exact kind of endurance you need to run a company.

Leadership is voluntarily putting on a weighted vest so your team can run fast.

You carry the weight of making payroll. You carry the anxiety of delayed payments. You carry the responsibility of making the right call when there is no safety net. You absorb that pressure so your team can focus on execution without fear.

When my two co founders and I started building Forwardly, we knew the weight we were taking on. We are a completely bootstrapped team. We have a brilliant CTO and decades of experience, but we still feel the heavy gravity of building an ambitious software company from the ground up every single day.

You do not get to take the vest off when you become the boss. The vest just gets heavier as you grow.

The secret is not trying to shed the responsibility. The secret is building the physical and mental strength to carry it without breaking.

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

Early stage founders and owners often fall into a dangerous trap. You look at a packed calendar and assume the business is thriving.

Years ago, I sat with a founder who was exhausted. His team was working overtime. His pipeline was completely full. Revenue was climbing every single month.

But when it was time to make payroll, he was always scrambling.

We printed his profit and loss statement. The revenue line looked fantastic. But as we went down the page, the reality set in. He was taking on low margin projects just to keep his team busy. He was confusing activity with profitability.

A profit and loss statement shows you what you earned. It does not show you what you collected. It does not show you the cash available in your bank account today.

If you are building a company, you must master the difference between revenue and cash flow. Revenue is a vanity metric if you cannot collect it.

Here are three steps to get clarity.

First, map out your margins per service line. Drop the ones that are just noise.
Second, track your days sales outstanding. Know exactly how long it takes a dollar to hit your account.
Third, stop looking at your profit and loss statement in a vacuum. Look at it next to your actual bank balance.

Survival as an operator comes down to cash, not just booked deals.

Are you tracking cash flow weekly or just waiting for the monthly statement to tell you how you did? Drop your thoughts below.

#Founders #Startups #CashFlow #Entrepreneurship

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

CFOs and finance leaders are rushing to implement AI tools, but they are falling into a massive trap.

The news this week is dominated by finance teams deploying artificial intelligence to speed up accounts payable. But here is the brutal reality: digitizing a broken process just gives you a faster bad process.

I recently spoke with a controller who inherited completely broken approval workflows from multiple acquisitions. In a panic, they bought a new AI routing tool, thinking the technology would save them. Instead, the AI simply accelerated the chaos. It flawlessly routed hundreds of minor invoices to the executive team, overwhelming the CEO with micro decisions and Saturday morning approval slogs.

That is the digitization trap. You cannot buy software to fix a broken operational foundation.

Before you look at an AI payment tool, map your current approval routing on a whiteboard. Define strict approval tiers based on dollar amounts first. Any invoice under $1000 is auto approved, while anything over $5000 requires the CFOs final sign off.

When you fix the foundation, the relief is immediate. With dynamic rules based routing, the system enforces the logic. The CFO retains absolute ironclad control over cash flow without being the daily bottleneck.

Software should amplify a good process, not mask a bad one.

How are you handling approval routing as your company scales? Drop your thoughts below.

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

It is 2 PM on a Friday and the founder of a 50 person staffing agency is refreshing their bank account again.

They have to run payroll for their contractors by 4 PM, but three major clients just decided to treat their Net 30 terms as Net 45.

This is the reality for most mid sized service firms. You are not just providing temporary talent. You are acting as a free, zero percent interest bank for your clients.

Every week, you float payroll out of pocket because you are waiting on a paper check to arrive in the mail, clear the bank, and finally show up as available funds.

The problem is rarely that your clients refuse to pay. The problem is that you have a follow up black hole. Businesses wait until an invoice is 15 days late before sending the very first manual reminder email.

You must stop waiting for a payment delay to become a crisis before you act.

Here is the exact playbook to fix this today:

First, standardize your payment timing immediately. Set up an automated cadence that sends a friendly reminder three days before the due date, on the exact due date, and three days after.

Second, stop sending static PDF invoices that require clients to manually write a check. Attach a Secure Payment Portal link to every invoice so they can pay digitally in two clicks.

Third, natively sync those incoming payments directly to your ledger to eliminate the frantic month end reconciliation fire drill.

By automating follow ups and offering digital payment experiences, staffing firms are getting paid five times faster.

Are you still floating payroll while waiting for client checks to clear, or have you already automated your receivables? Drop your thoughts below.

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

Everyone tells young founders that early failure is a permanent scar.

They are wrong. Failing early is the greatest education you will ever receive.

Over 30 years ago, as a college student in India, I took every single rupee I saved from tutoring and started a textile factory.

I thought I was going to be a textile tycoon. Instead, I lost it all.

The reason was not a bad product. We just failed to collect payments. I was too inexperienced to ask clients to pay what they owed us.

We ran out of cash. The dream shattered.

But failing young is a gift. You can absorb massive risks before you carry the weight of a mortgage.

That brutal failure forced me to understand reality: Revenue is vanity. Cash flow is survival.

That specific failure is why Forwardly exists today. 82 percent of small businesses fail because of cash flow problems.

If our technology can auto collect payments so a founder never has to make an awkward collections call, we win.

If we can save a few thousand businesses from closing, my job is done.

Did an early failure completely shift the trajectory of your career?

#Founders #CashFlow #StartupLessons

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

To every bootstrapped founder and early stage owner in the B2B space: your biggest threat is not a lack of customers.
It is the silence of unpaid invoices.

Over 30 years ago, I spent every penny of my savings to start a small textile factory in India.

The dream shattered within two years. Why? We failed to collect payments. We were so inexperienced we did not even call to ask for payment.

We fell into the receivables follow up black hole. We thought our clients were the problem, but we actually had a process problem.

When you are bootstrapped, you do not have a venture capital safety net to float your payroll when a client decides to pay 45 days late.

Here is the exact playbook to fix this:

1. Standardize your payment timing.
Set up a strict cadence for automated reminders before, on, and after the due date.
2. Upgrade your payment experience.
Stop sending static PDF invoices. Offer a secure payment portal so your clients can pay instantly.
3. Fix the working capital cycle.
If you pay vendors in 15 days but collect in 45 days, you have a 30 day cash gap that will choke your business.

Failing young taught me a brutal lesson: over 80 percent of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems. That failure is exactly why Forwardly exists today.

How are you handling late paying clients? Drop your thoughts below.

If you are a bootstrapped founder struggling with cash flow predictability, connect with me and send a DM.

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

The CEO of a 50 person temporary staffing firm was sitting at his desk at 4 PM on a Friday, desperately waiting for a wire transfer to clear so he could cover contractor payroll.

His clients, mid sized logistics companies, were treating his Net 30 terms as a suggestion. Net 30 had become Net 45. Some were pushing Net 60. The staffing agency was effectively acting as a free, zero percent interest bank for their own clients, floating payroll out of pocket every single week.

This is a massive cash flow crisis for growing businesses. The problem is not that clients refuse to pay. The problem is the receivables follow up black hole.

Waiting until an invoice is 15 days past due before sending a manual email is a recipe for disaster. Every day an invoice sits unpaid, the agency is financing the operations of another business.

They finally decided to stop playing the waiting game. They implemented our secure payment portal connected directly to their accounting ledger. Instead of waiting for a check in the mail, they standardized their payment timing. They set up an AI collections employee to handle automated follow ups three days before the due date, on the due date, and three days after.

The result? They now get paid five times faster. The frantic Friday afternoon payroll panic disappeared entirely. By automating the collection process, they stopped acting like a free bank and took control of their cash flow.

How are you handling late paying clients in your industry? Are you still manually chasing invoices, or have you automated the follow up? Drop your thoughts below.
#CashFlow #Staffing #AccountsReceivable

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

Finance leaders are drowning in theoretical content about artificial intelligence. But what is the actual, measurable business value? We need to talk about Autonomous Finance and moving from vision to reality.

The biggest pitfall I see is the Digitization Trap. Companies buy a shiny new tool to digitize their accounts payable workflow, but they do not fix the underlying broken process first. Digitizing a bad process just gives you a faster bad process.

The Playbook:

1. Map your process first. Identify exactly where the manual bottlenecks are on a whiteboard.
2. Enforce strict tiers. Implement clear approval tiers based on dollar amounts.
3. Shift to Autonomous Accounting. Deploy AI agents to handle routine coding and only escalate true exceptions.

When you delegate the routine busywork, your team stops playing the reconciliation game and starts focusing on strategy.

What is your take? Are you seeing real outcomes from AI in your finance stack yet?

#AutonomousFinance #CFO #CashFlow

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

CFOs and Founders of mid sized businesses, your accounts payable process is likely a massive security risk waiting to happen. Digitizing a broken process just means you make mistakes faster.

The biggest operational pitfall I see is relying on single point approvals for large payouts. A rogue invoice slips in, one person clicks approve, and the cash is gone.

Here is your operational playbook to fix this today:

1. Map your approval tiers clearly. Any invoice over a set threshold must require a secondary review.
2. Implement two key segregation of duties. The person who creates the invoice in the system should never be the person who releases the funds.
3. Standardize your payment timing. Stop paying invoices the day they arrive. Batch them to align with your cash flow cycle.

Software cannot fix bad policy. Get the fundamentals right first.

How are you handling payment approvals in your finance stack?

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

When your health care system fails to stop the blood flow of an 80 year old senior on blood thinners for more than 6 hours, you have really failed. Still waiting to see the doctor.

What are you waiting for? Are you going to wait till the last drop of the blood is out and person is dead before you fix our waits in emergency rooms? @Dave_Eby @Josie_Osborne @Fraserhealth @CTVVancouver @GlobalBC @CBCVancouver @CityNewsVAN

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

Bootstrapped founders and operators scaling early stage teams face a unique survival test. Every dollar matters when you are funding growth out of your own pocket.

I recently read about a B2B SaaS startup that scaled to $5M in annual revenue completely bootstrapped but almost went bankrupt because they confused booked revenue with actual cash flow. They hired a massive sales team to chase enterprise deals while ignoring their 90 day collection cycles.

VC funded competitors can afford to float massive payrolls while waiting for clients to pay. Bootstrapped businesses cannot. The grit it takes to survive requires extreme financial discipline.

Here is the operator playbook to fix this pitfall before it kills your company:

1. Shorten your payment terms immediately. Stop accepting Net 60 if your operational costs require Net 30 liquidity.
2. Automate your Accounts Receivable follow ups. Do not rely on human memory to chase late invoices.
3. Demand secure direct bank payments instead of waiting on paper checks that get lost in the mail.

If you are a bootstrapped founder struggling with cash flow bottlenecks, connect with me and send a DM.

What is your take on balancing aggressive sales with tight collection cycles? Drop your thoughts below.

#Bootstrapped #CashFlow #Founders

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

For MSP founders and B2B service CFOs, there is a brutal truth nobody wants to admit.

Net 30 terms are just a polite form of wage theft.

Every day an invoice sits unpaid, your business secretly finances another company at zero percent interest. You act as a free bank for larger corporations who use your money to float their working capital.

When a client treats Net 30 as Net 45, you are the one taking out expensive lines of credit to make Friday payroll. You wait 5 to 10 extra days to get paid because your collections process allows them to delay.

The solution is not more friendly reminder emails. Stop acting like a free bank today.

First, digitize the payment experience. Stop emailing raw PDF invoices as your payment vehicle.

Second, build an automated cadence. Standardize your payment timing with notices three days before, on the day of, and three days after the due date.

Third, implement a secure payment portal. When clients can pay instantly without friction, the excuse of the check being in the mail disappears.

Do not let other companies use your cash to fund their growth.

Is accepting Net 30 terms still necessary, or is it an outdated norm? Let us debate below.

#CFO #CashFlow #Founders

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

Hospitality CFOs and restaurant group AP managers are falling into a massive digitization trap. You buy a shiny new accounts payable tool to modernize your back office, but you forget to fix the underlying broken process first.

Digitizing a bad process just gives you a faster bad process.

I see hospitality groups processing high volume payouts every single week. They implement software to eliminate paper checks but leave their chaotic approval chains completely intact. An AP manager should not spend 90 minutes deciding whether a routine 97 dollar produce order needs executive approval. If your system still waits for the regional director to manually approve basic supplies, you have not solved the problem. You have only moved the bottleneck from a physical desk to a digital inbox. The result is the same: vendors get paid late, relationships strain, and the finance team is stuck chasing approvals.

Here is the practical playbook to fix the root cause before you adopt new software:

First, map out your current approval routing on a whiteboard. You need to see exactly where the bottlenecks exist.
Second, define strict approval tiers based purely on dollar amounts. Stop routing everything to the top.
Third, implement a strict two key system to ensure the person inputting the invoice is never the one authorizing the release of funds.

Do not digitize chaos. Build a mature process first, then let the software run it.

What is the most absurd bottleneck you have found in your approval chain? Let us debate the best way to fix it in the comments below.

#Hospitality #AccountsPayable #CashFlow

[Nick Chandi @Nick_Chandi]

CFOs and finance leaders are rushing to deploy AI across their accounting systems. But treating AI as a magical fix for fundamentally broken AP workflows is a massive operational mistake.

The harsh reality is that artificial intelligence is completely useless if your core financial data is trapped in manual silos. You cannot automate what you do not control. If your finance team is still manually entering vendor banking details from PDF attachments or chasing down approvals via a chaotic shared inbox, deploying an AI wrapper will only help you make the same mistakes faster.

Before you invest in another flashy automation tool, you need to fix the root cause of your data problems.

First, standardize your approval tiers immediately. Map out exactly who needs to approve what and hardcode those rules directly into your payment system so nothing moves without digital authorization.

Second, stop using email to collect sensitive vendor data. Implement a secure self service portal where vendors manage their own banking details directly.

Third, ensure your payment platform syncs directly and seamlessly with QuickBooks Online to eliminate manual reconciliation entirely. Only when your data is clean and your workflows are secure can AI actually add value.

Are you seeing finance teams successfully deploy AI, or are they just digitizing their broken processes? I want to hear your direct operational experience. Where is AI actually working in your finance tech stack right now? Drop your thoughts below and let us debate.