To double its clients, Praevo is automating the back office

Karl Lloyd has been a fractional CFO for six years. Fifteen months ago he co-founded Praevo Partners to fix a problem with the model:

Fractional CFOs go into a business and they often need to start by tidying the bookkeeping and preparing the management accounts, before they can get stuck into the value-add stuff. The cash flow forecasting, the three-year plan, contribution margin by channel or SKU, the things that the founders value.

Praevo’s answer is a bench of around 12 independent CFOs, with bookkeepers and heads of finance underneath them to do the groundwork. It now serves 30 direct-to-consumer brands, roughly 90% e-commerce, mostly on Shopify Plus and Xero, and targets brands with revenues of £2m to £30m.

Because Praevo bills on outcomes and deliverables, not days in the office, its CFOs also track marketing performance, from weekly CAC-to-LTV ratios to retention on subscription brands. That gives the month-end board meeting a fully rounded narrative, something that Praevo’s clients value a lot.

One of Praevo Partners’ clients used to handle supplier invoices by “printing invoices off... then scanning them and uploading them into the accounting system, putting all the narrative in, coding it correctly, then moving on to the next one.”

Lloyd says that system now sounds “ridiculous,” and someone in accounts payable would be doing it all day. And card spend was no better:

If anyone was lucky enough to have a credit card, trying to reconcile the credit card statement at the end of the month again was a nightmare. If you had all your receipts, someone would need to go through and cross-check vs the spend, code all those receipts correctly and make sure that the VAT’s been accounted for correctly, and then chase up for missing invoices, missing receipts. Very, very admin heavy.

Previously, cards ran on Pleo, with prepaid cards, spending limits and a receipt-capture app. Invoices came in through Hubdoc inside Xero: the team forwarded each one to an email address and it landed in the system.

At Praevo’s main Moss client, card spend, Google and Meta ad spend and supplier invoices now flow through Moss into Xero. Moss is effectively the only way invoices get in. The whole team captures receipts as part of the daily routine, though a few do, of course, still come in late.

Lloyd says Moss and the Pleo cards the team used before are “fairly similar in the areas that overlap.” What he values is the breadth: they used Pleo for card spend, and now use Moss for that as well as handling all other invoices and, soon, supplier payments, “the whole purchase-to-pay wrapped up in one.” He finds the portal intuitive for moving limits and adding cards, though he wishes “that download button was easier to find.”

Supplier payments are the next target. At the client, a weekly or fortnightly payment run takes “half of Monday” and three to five people. Invoices go to department heads for approval, then to the founder to check, then someone loads each payment onto the bank and the founder authorises every one. “That bit is still a pain,” Lloyd says, “and that’s the bit we’re just getting over the line.”

With Moss payments, invoices arrive already approved through Moss’s approval process. Subject to there being enough cash in the wallet, it is “bang, pay, and that’s all taken care of.” The goal is 10 minutes each for the people involved and “an hour or two as a collective.” Lloyd hopes to have it live in the coming months.

Lloyd joined the client just as Moss went live. From what he understands, uptake was slower than hoped, but the admin side was intuitive and the team was soon up and running. He sees the software as the easy part. The harder job is explaining what the controls are for.

Clients often don’t realise Moss has authorisation processes built in, and accountancy language does not help. When a founder can see the head of ops has already agreed an invoice, it saves them an email, and saves Praevo emailing the head of ops.

You can talk to them about four-eyes or three-way match, and they’re like, what are you talking about? Fundamentally they want to know the invoice is genuine, that it’s for something approved and ordered and received.

Cardholders get a plain message: “We’re giving you a credit card, this is what it means. With great power comes great responsibility. You must upload your receipts and invoices.” The reminders stay simple. Capture the receipt at the point of purchase, because it’s much easier for everyone, and forward every invoice to the Moss address. The one problem that does pop up from time to time is cash, and making sure the account is topped up before a payment run.

While Moss enforces the controls, explaining why they matter, in terms a founder cares about, is still the firm’s job.

The client used to have three people in finance, but that work is now outsourced to Praevo, which spends about two to three days a week on it. Lloyd is careful about attribution: “That’s not all because Moss came on board ... but that’s certainly allowed us to come in and take that on.”

He estimates the bookkeeping saving alone at £1,000 a month at least, with a stronger control environment on top.

For Lloyd, the case for AI is speed: “a lot of the benefits are immediate rather than traditional investments in tech that can take years to pay back.”

His clearest example came at a month-end when the accounts were not finalised and the bookkeeper was on holiday. Lloyd connected Claude to Moss through Moss’s MCP integration and asked what accruals and prepayments were needed, based on what was in Xero and Moss and on the invoices. “It literally just told me,” he says. “Massive time saver.”

Praevo is now three months into building its own AI reporting tool, which pulls data from Xero, Shopify Plus, marketing platforms and Moss into weekly and monthly analysis. Moss is one of a growing number of finance tools with an MCP server; our list of MCP servers accountants can connect to AI covers others. It is in trial with one client, and Lloyd wants to roll it out to others via a client portal very soon.

Doubling the client base will take more automation and efficiency, Lloyd says. The aim is a plug-and-play back office where, once a client’s systems are connected, reporting runs without waiting for month-end.

Praevo is also looking to incorporate bookkeeping into the AI tool, because Lloyd finds a lot of bookkeepers are still “pretty manual,” particularly on matching, prepaying and accruing. The goal, he says, is to make it “a lot quicker for the clients to start to see the benefit of working with us, such as clean books, insightful commercial reporting, profit improvement ideas and a plan to scale.”

What is Praevo Partners?

Praevo Partners is a fractional CFO firm for direct-to-consumer brands, co-founded by Karl Lloyd. It has a bench of around 12 independent CFOs and serves 30 brands, mostly on Shopify Plus and Xero, with revenues of £2m to £30m.

What does Moss do for Praevo’s client?

Card spend, Google and Meta ad spend and supplier invoices flow through Moss into Xero, with approvals built in. Supplier payments through Moss are the next step.

How much has it saved?

Karl Lloyd estimates the bookkeeping saving at £1,000 a month at least, with a stronger control environment on top. He is careful to say not all of the change is down to Moss.

How did Praevo use Claude with Moss?

At a month-end with the bookkeeper away, Lloyd connected Claude to Moss through Moss’s MCP integration and asked which accruals and prepayments were needed, based on Xero, Moss and the invoices.

What did Praevo use before Moss?

Pleo for cards and receipt capture, and Hubdoc inside Xero for invoices.

Karl Lloyd is co-founder of Praevo Partners, a fractional CFO firm for direct-to-consumer brands.