The Platform Your Audit Committee Will Actually Approve.
Most CFOs see SaaS spend grow 20-30% YoY without a corresponding revenue lift — death by a thousand subscriptions. Aeion consolidates the vendor list: 12 SaaS bills become flat per-module pricing on one invoice. Real-time financials, native subscription billing, multi-currency, per-tenant AI cost caps, automated month-end close, AI-narrated variance analysis. SOC 2 Type II audit in flight. Customer-owned data. Predictable cost curve. The platform that survives both the audit and the budget meeting.
What Aeion Delivers for the Finance Function
Vendor Consolidation Math
~$878K/year typical bolt-on SaaS stack → ~$145K/year on Aeion at mid-stage scale. 80% reduction in vendor count = 80% reduction in security questionnaires + procurement cycles + integration debt. See full TCO math →
Native Subscription Billing
Recurring billing across Stripe / Adyen / Square / PayPal / Razorpay. Dunning, proration, usage-based pricing, multi-currency, tax handling. No separate Chargify / Recurly / Maxio contract. Read Billing →
Per-Tenant AI Cost Caps
Set monthly cost budgets per tenant. Warn at 80%, soft-block at 95%, hard-block at 100%. Zero surprise AI bills, even with usage spikes. Forecasting dashboard surfaces budget burn vs runway. Read AI cost controls →
Real-Time Financial Dashboards
Revenue / GMV / churn / MRR / ARR / cohort retention / margin by segment — all real-time from the live database. No 30-day Looker lag, no ETL pipeline maintenance. AeionClaw can narrate the variance in plain English. Read BI →
AI-Narrated Month-End Close
An AI finance skill drafts your variance commentary, flags anomalies before your auditor does, and turns the raw numbers into board commentary and investor-update bullets. You review and edit — you're not writing the narrative from a blank page every month.
Multi-Currency + Multi-Entity
Operate across legal entities, currencies, tax jurisdictions natively. Consolidation reporting handles inter-company eliminations. FX rates auto-update via configurable provider.
Audit-Ready From Day One
Immutable audit log on every financial transaction. SOC 2 Type II compliant. Per-document version history undoes any miskey. Compliance reports auto-generated monthly. Read Aegis →
Executive AI Assistant
An executive AI skill drafts your board materials, war-room incident coordination briefs, competitive-intel briefings, and weekly exec-team summaries — pulling from every module's data but speaking with a single, consistent narrator's voice.
The SaaS Spend Audit — What You're Actually Paying
Most CFOs have never done a clean accounting of SaaS spend across the org. Here's what one looks like for a 100-person SaaS at Series B.
``` Finance & Accounting: QuickBooks / NetSuite $8,000-50,000/yr Bill.com $6,000-15,000/yr Expensify / Ramp $5,000-20,000/yr Stripe Billing (additional %) 1% of subscription revenue Chargify / Recurly $30,000-60,000/yr
Sales & CRM: Salesforce Sales Cloud $150/user × 30 = $54,000/yr Salesforce Service Cloud $165/user × 12 = $24,000/yr HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro $9,600/yr Outreach / SalesLoft $12,000-40,000/yr Gong / Chorus $20,000-60,000/yr
Marketing: Mailchimp / Klaviyo $15,000-40,000/yr Mixpanel / Amplitude $12,000-40,000/yr Customer.io $10,000-30,000/yr Webflow / Contentful $5,000-25,000/yr Ahrefs / Semrush $5,000-10,000/yr
Support: Zendesk Suite + Copilot $40,000-80,000/yr Intercom + Fin $30,000-100,000/yr (per conv)
Infra & Dev: Auth0 / Okta $12,000-50,000/yr Datadog Pro / Splunk $30,000-200,000/yr Cloudflare Enterprise $15,000-50,000/yr PagerDuty + Statuspage $5,000-15,000/yr
AI: OpenAI Enterprise $36,000-120,000/yr (estimated) Anthropic Claude (added separately) $12,000-40,000/yr Vertical AI tools (Drift, etc.) $10,000-30,000/yr
People Ops: Lattice / 15Five $5,000-15,000/yr Greenhouse / Lever $10,000-30,000/yr Carta $5,000-20,000/yr
Misc: Zapier / Make / Workato $5,000-30,000/yr Notion Enterprise $5,000-15,000/yr Slack Pro $10,000-25,000/yr
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Mid-range estimate: ~$640K - $1.4M/yr Plus 2-3 FTEs spent on integration glue: ~$360-540K/yr ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Total ANNUAL "platform tax": ~$1M - $1.9M/yr ```
Aeion replaces ~80% of this with a handful of Aeion module subscriptions + your AI provider's API costs. Conservative estimate for the same 100-person org: $200-350K/year all-in.
Capital efficiency improvement: ~$700K-$1.5M/year released to product / sales / engineering headcount.
Predictable AI Spend — The Concern That Worries Boards
"AI spend" is the new "cloud spend" — projected to be the largest line-item on most SaaS opex budgets by 2027. Boards are asking specifically. Aeion's answer is structural, not aspirational.
Hard cost caps, enforced automatically — not aspirational.
You set a daily, weekly, or monthly USD budget per tenant. At 80% of budget, your admin gets an alert. At 95%, the platform starts warning users on every call but still lets work finish (soft block). At 100%, new AI calls are rejected outright until the period resets — existing conversations are allowed to finish, but the meter stops there. No engineer has to build this; it's a setting, not a project.
Multi-provider routing for cost optimization:
- Bulk classification tasks → Gemini 2.0 Flash ($0.10/1M tokens in)
- Complex reasoning → Claude 4 Opus or GPT-4o
- Embeddings → Voyage AI or Cohere
- One real customer cut spend 99.5% by switching from GPT-4o-only to cost-routed Gemini + DeepSeek for bulk
Provider cost dashboard:
Per-tenant, per-provider, per-model spend with 30-day trend, forecasted month-end, anomaly detection. Surface burn-rate increases before they become budget breaches.
Board-level reporting:
The executive AI skill drafts your monthly AI-spend variance reports for you: "October AI spend $14,200 vs $11,500 budget. +23% driven by new customer cohort with above-average usage on the support-agent skill. Forecast for November: $13,800 stable. Recommend no budget increase."
What Your Finance Team Stops Doing
Reconciling 12 vendor invoices
Down to flat per-module pricing on one invoice, every month.
Chasing rogue SaaS subscriptions
One consolidated procurement record instead of a spreadsheet nobody trusts.
Stitching analytics from 6 dashboards
One BI module, one source of truth, no export-and-merge ritual.
Per-vendor security questionnaires
One platform questionnaire instead of twelve.
Manual variance commentary
An AI finance skill drafts it for you — you edit, not author from scratch.
Multi-currency conversion in spreadsheets
Native multi-currency handling, built in from the start.
Per-vendor SOC 2 verification
One SOC 2 report — Aeion's — instead of chasing a dozen vendors' auditors.
AI bill shock
Per-tenant cost caps mean spend can't run away on you, ever.
The Capital Efficiency Story
Capital efficiency is the metric every modern board tracks. Aeion improves it in three concrete ways.
1. Lower direct SaaS spend. $640K-1.4M/year typical → $200-350K/year on Aeion. ~$400-1000K/year improvement. Goes straight to runway.
2. Lower platform-engineering headcount. Integration glue costs 1-3 FTEs at most SaaS companies. Aeion needs ~0.25 FTE (a single eng can maintain it part-time). 1-3 engineer-years per year of runway redirected to feature work.
3. Faster time-to-revenue on new features. Adding subscriptions / loyalty / B2B / international takes weeks on Aeion vs quarters on bolt-on stacks. Faster product-market-fit iteration = faster ARR growth = lower burn multiple.
Worked example: a Series A SaaS at $4M ARR, 100% YoY growth.
``` Before (bolt-on stack): Annual SaaS subscriptions: ~$680K Platform-eng (2 FTE): ~$360K Investor-promised runway: 18 months Actual runway after platform: 14 months CAC payback: 16 months
After (Aeion): Aeion platform + provider: ~$80K + $40K Platform-eng (0.25 FTE): ~$45K Investor-promised runway: 18 months Actual runway: 20 months CAC payback: 13 months Saved annually: ~$870K ```
The capital efficiency improvement (~$870K/year) is more than most Series A rounds raise specifically for "platform headcount." Aeion converts that into product velocity instead.
CFO questions
À-la-carte — you pick the modules your business needs, not a bundled suite. Most modules are one flat monthly price with unlimited users (no per-seat billing) and a 14-day free trial — there's no permanent free tier. A handful of deep modules carry real usage tiers gated to advanced features: Finance runs $49/$99/$199/mo for payroll, HR, banking, tax, and benefits; BI runs $39/$79/mo for its pro analytics tier. Platform services — billing, the AI gateway, Aegis backups, and governance — are included free with any module. An optional All-Access plan (~$399/mo) bundles the whole platform for teams that want everything. AI provider costs pass through at the provider's published rate (zero markup). No transaction fees on commerce orders (you pay your payment processor's rate directly).
Most contracts have notice periods (30-90 days). Migrate the data via Aeion Singularity connectors, run both systems in parallel during the notice period, terminate at contract end. Net cash outflow timing: 2-4 months of overlap, then $300-700K/year ongoing savings.
Per-tenant cost caps make AI spend deterministic. You set a USD budget; the platform enforces it automatically. Worst case is you hit your budget — never that you exceed it. Forecasting dashboard predicts month-end based on burn rate.
Yes — Aeion deploys to your VPS, your AWS EC2, your GCP GCE, your Azure VM. You retain control of infrastructure billing. Aeion is the software layer, not the hosting provider (unless you choose our managed-SaaS tier).
Multi-entity support is native — operate parent + subsidiary + JV entities under one Aeion deployment. Inter-company transactions, consolidation reporting, multi-currency conversion, entity-specific tax handling all built in.
No overage fees (rate-limited rather than billed). No exit fees — your data is yours. Professional services available but not required (most customers self-deploy in days).
Aeion's Finance module covers AR/AP, invoicing, expense tracking, financial reporting. NetSuite is broader (full ERP including supply chain, inventory accounting, manufacturing modules) but $50K-200K/year and a 6-18 month implementation. Aeion is right for SaaS / DTC / services companies; NetSuite is right for traditional enterprise with complex inventory/manufacturing.
Yes — the audit log meets SOC 2 CC6.1/CC7.1, HIPAA §164.312(b), and ISO 27001 A.12.4 logging requirements. Append-only schema, complete event capture, SIEM-exportable. Most auditors prefer Aeion's unified log to stitching together 12 vendor logs.
Aeion ships as deployable software — you can keep running on your infrastructure indefinitely without Aeion staff involvement. Your data is in your DB + bucket. Multiple-vendor risk mitigation is structurally not a concern.