How Halcyon Labs replaced three spreadsheets

Halcyon Labs makes diagnostic equipment for research laboratories. As the company grew from 30 to 120 people, its finance operations grew into three spreadsheets that everyone depended on and nobody trusted: one for approvals, one for vendor payments and one for cash forecasting.

Spreadsheet one: approvals

Purchase requests were emailed to managers, who replied with a yes or no. The finance team copied those replies into a spreadsheet to track what had been approved. Requests got lost, approvals were missed and auditors asked uncomfortable questions.

What replaced it: approval rules in Saro. Requests are submitted in one place, routed automatically based on amount, department and vendor, and approved from email, team chat or the mobile app. Every decision is recorded with a timestamp.

Spreadsheet two: vendor payments

Halcyon pays around 400 suppliers, many of them overseas. The payments spreadsheet listed invoices, due dates and bank details, and someone uploaded batches to the bank twice a week. Bank details changed without anyone noticing, and duplicate payments happened more than once.

What replaced it: Saro bill pay. Invoices are captured from a shared inbox, matched to approved purchase requests and scheduled automatically. Changes to vendor bank details require a second approval, which has already stopped one attempted fraud.

Spreadsheet three: the cash forecast

The forecast pulled numbers from the other two spreadsheets plus the bank portal. It was rebuilt every month and was out of date by the time it was finished.

What replaced it: a live cash view in Saro that combines balances, scheduled payments and expected receivables. Saro AI answers forecasting questions directly, such as how a delayed customer payment would affect next month’s runway.

The outcome

• Three spreadsheets retired, along with the weekly meetings that kept them in sync.

• Duplicate payments down to zero.

• Audit preparation reduced from three weeks to four days.

“Nobody misses the spreadsheets. What they miss is not knowing where things stood, and that’s exactly the point.”

How they made the switch

Halcyon didn’t retire all three spreadsheets at once. They moved approvals first, because every other process depended on knowing what had been approved. Bill pay followed a month later, then the cash forecast once the first two were running smoothly.

The team kept each spreadsheet read-only for one quarter after the switch, as a safety net. Nobody opened them after the second month.