After 15+ years watching operations teams struggle to get straight answers about their own spend, I decided to build the solution myself.
I'll never forget the support ticket that got escalated to me a few years back. A chef at a busy restaurant in Canary Wharf, UK, had just been promoted. His new responsibility? Improve food cost. His email to our support team was five words long:
"Can you explain what food cost is?"
Here was someone brilliant at their craft - good enough to earn a promotion in one of London's most competitive dining scenes - being handed a financial target with zero training in what it actually meant. No explanation of how to calculate it, no benchmarks to aim for, no visibility into the numbers that would tell him if he was succeeding or failing.
That moment crystallised something I'd experienced countless times throughout my own career. The gap between operations and finance isn't just frustrating. It's costing businesses money every single day.
Learning the hard way
In one of my early business ventures, I couldn't afford expensive accountancy or consultancy. Contact with my accountant was minimal - the odd question here, a compliance check there. It's an ironic reality of business: you need close guidance from someone who knows your business, precisely when you have the least money to pay for it.
Still, I pushed through to year end. My accountant reviewed the numbers, looked surprised and congratulated me on a very profitable year. I felt great - for about thirty seconds.
Then came the little surprise. The Corporation Tax bill was huge. And there was nothing I could do about it. No offsets. No reinvestments I could point to. Just a big payout that wiped out cash I could have invested incrementally throughout the year in things that would have helped grow the business faster.
Looking back, if I’d had better visibility into where I was heading, I could have made different choices. But my experience was all front office: clients, growth, delivery. On the backoffice finance side? I was flying blind. And by the time the picture became clear, it was too late to change course.
More resources, same problems
A decade later and a new business, my organisational structure looked very different. We had two internal finance heads and an external firm. Looking back, it was a significant investment in finance resource - yet the visibility gap persisted.
But here’s what surprised me: even with all that resource, I still sat in board meetings staring at spreadsheet printouts with backward-looking commentary. We could see the numbers. We could listen to the explanations. But it still made no sense from a big-picture perspective.
I'll admit it - I'm a visual person. But then, I think most people in operations are. We think in flows, in patterns, in cause and effect. Hand us a table with no benchmarks, no metrics, no trends and it's utterly lacking. It tells us what happened, which if you’re a business owner you have a gut feel anyway, but this data gives no context for whether that's good, bad or indifferent.
My experience might be unique, but I doubt it. Whether you have internal finance resource to hand or rely entirely on external support, the gaps persist. I never felt I actually got what I was looking for.
That's why OmniPATH exists.
The scenario that keeps me up at night
I love a British pub. So let me paint you a picture that I think about often.
Imagine you run a pub. There's a big match on at the weekend. You want to order in plenty of drink - it's going to be super busy and you don't want to run dry when the place is packed. You call your supplier to place the order.
"Sorry, your account's on hold."
You call finance asking why. They'll need to run a report to check. It's Thursday. Your cut-off for next-day delivery is 2pm. You chase the report. It lands end of day.
Now you've got options and none of them are good. Pay over the odds for a rush delivery, if one's even available. Order for the next available delivery day, which might be after the weekend. Or scramble to find a new supplier who can help at short notice.
All of these add risk. Some lose you money directly on premium delivery charges. But if all options fail and you're left with limited stock on the biggest trading day of the month? You're not just losing revenue. You're losing customer loyalty. Regulars who came for the atmosphere and left disappointed.
You can probably tell I'm getting a bit animated. But this scenario plays out in different forms across hospitality, care homes, retail - anywhere operations depend on finance for answers they can't access themselves.
The core frustration
What drives me mad is simple: not being able to see what's been spent, where the budget sits, what else money is going on across different teams. We're all human -things slip through the net. A standing order continues after it should have stopped. A supplier quietly increases their prices.
But if you don't study it, you can't influence it.
And that brings me back to where I started - potentially arriving at year end with a large tax bill that could have otherwise been invested incrementally in something that would have helped grow the business faster. In better systems. In better people. In better stock. In whatever the business actually needed.
Instead, you hand it to HMRC because you didn't see it coming until it was too late.
In summary
I built OmniPATH because I lived these frustrations - from both sides of the table. As an entrepreneur who couldn't get straight answers. As a business owner blindsided by year-end surprises. As a board member staring at spreadsheets that told me everything and nothing at the same time.
The gap between operations and finance isn't a personality clash or a communication failure. It's a systems problem. Operations teams think in categories that make sense to how they run their sites. Finance teams think in ledger codes and cost centres. Neither is wrong - but without a bridge between them, critical decisions get delayed, made on gut instinct or not made at all.
OmniPATHis that bridge. It gives operations real-time visibility into their spend in language they understand, while finance maintains control and oversight. No more three-week waits for a report. No more cat-and-mouse clarification cycles. No more 50/50 guesswork on decisions that affect your bottom line.
Because when you can see what's happening, truly see it, in real time, in terms that make sense - you can influence it. You can course-correct before small problems become big ones. You can invest incrementally instead of paying tax on profits you didn't realise you'd made. You can run your business instead of reacting to it.
That's why OmniPATH exists. Built for Operations. Trusted by Finance.
