Spend Management: Moss Founder Ante Spittler on End-to-End Workflows, Data, and AI

This interview is based on an episode of the torq.partners Finance Podcast featuring guest Ante Spittler, founder and CEO of Moss. The full episode is available on Spotify and YouTube as a video podcast.

How did your experience as a founder lead to the idea of thinking about finance in a radically different way?

The biggest “aha” moments came from real-world experience: first, the restaurant industry, with strict cash discipline and personal liability; then, hypergrowth with tens of thousands of transactions, paper receipts, and time-consuming cleanup. The contrast with modern sales and marketing tech stacks revealed that finance lacked integrated systems—and that became the starting point for Moss.

What did you learn early on about scaling that still applies today?

Systems beat heroism. Scaling is only possible when processes are designed to function without the founders—whether in the kitchen, front-of-house, marketing, or finance. This mindset of repeatable, measurable workflows is at the heart of productive automation.

What are the typical reasons why finance setups have failed, and what caused them?

Media breaks, siloed tools, and a lack of context. Paper invoices, a proliferation of cards, and separate systems without proper data matching. This eats up resources and hinders audits and financing. The realization: Finance needs the same product and data standards as the rest of the company.

How do you assess market demand—basic vs. advanced?

Many teams are still in the early stages: digitally collecting receipts, pre-assigning accounts, and performing accurate reconciliations. More advanced teams are focusing on data consolidation, reporting/FP&A integration, and budget accountability. The leaders are experimenting with AI, often with a focus on transaction coding and anomalies.

Realistically, what role does AI play, and what are its limitations?

AI excels at recurring coding tasks and quality checks. In practice, a very large portion of manual posting steps can be eliminated if the rules and data are correct. At the same time, audit compliance remains mandatory: deterministic logic comes first, with AI serving as an accelerator within clear parameters.

How does Moss position itself in a crowded spend management market?

A finance suite rather than a point solution. The goal is to cover both the cost and revenue sides as well as the entire end-to-end flow: from budgeting and approval through purchasing, reconciliation, payment, and accounting all the way to controlling/FP&A, with payments as an integral part of the workflow.

Why isn't adoption as widespread as it could be?

Because many teams have built viable manual workarounds over the years. As personnel changes, visibility, and tool maturity improve, willingness to adopt automation grows—and once a team automates a process, it practically never goes back to doing it manually. The S-curve is just starting to gain momentum.

How is automation changing the role of finance?

Moving away from data collection toward strategic planning: less admin, more strategic direction. Finance gets a seat at the table earlier in the process, identifies patterns in costs and revenue, prioritizes actions, and helps teams in Product, Marketing, and Operations achieve measurable improvements based on clean data flows.

What is your vision for the next five years?

A finance-focused data hub, deeply integrated with ledgers and operational systems. Native AI agents for standard tasks, open interfaces for special cases, and a workflow suite that brings the entire accounting process onto the platform, with compliance by design and a focus on the value people bring.

What should CFOs focus on in the short term when modernizing their tech stack?

First, lay a solid foundation: clear revenue and cost structures, streamlined workflows, and compliance. Then minimize the human touch through end-to-end automation of the procurement and invoicing process, including payments. And use AI pragmatically: for example, have a model pre-structure monthly reports and invest the time saved in analysis.

What personal lesson continues to shape your approach to this day?

Cash and system discipline. Both require clear decisions, measurable processes, and products that deliver real efficiency—not just a pretty facade. That’s exactly what transforms finance from a back-office function into an enabler.