Fintablo
How a B2B financial accounting service sped up team communication with Pachca
About the company
I'm Irina, and I'm in charge of product and marketing at Fintablo.
Fintablo is a financial and management accounting service for businesses. We give companies a visual breakdown of their expenses and make analytics simpler. More than 2,100 businesses currently use our platform.
Life before Pachca
We've been working in Pachca for almost a year. Before that, starting in 2020, we used the free version of Slack. Then Slack left, and we switched to Rocket Chat.
It had similar features and a free self-hosted version, but we ran into some hidden pitfalls: the outdated interface was annoying, and there was a limit on push notifications. We'd hit it quickly, and then we had to keep opening the app to check for new messages. Because of that, some urgent conversations started drifting over to Telegram.
In 2023, we noticed that Russian services had gotten better, and we decided to pick something more modern that actually sent notifications.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
When we were choosing, there was just one reason: Pachca was exactly the business team chat app we were looking for, not a bunch of services bundled into one shell or a simple Telegram-style chat. Now I can see we made the right call. We came to love things we didn't expect, like cross-chat threads and tags, and thanks to them the results beat our expectations. The design is also really good and well thought out. A year of use has proved it.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
Discussions got faster thanks to cross-chat threads
At first I was wary of them. I thought everyone would start tagging each other and reading other people's threads. But once I told the team about them and we started using them, they really made life easier. I think 100% of our employees use them now. Nobody's afraid to write in a DM or a small team chat: information in Pachca won't get lost anyway.
Here's my personal example:
I lead teams, and someone always needs something from me. Now I use cross-chat threads to pull in the right people. I tag someone in a thread, hand the discussion over to them and watch how it goes. I don't need to check in separately or ask for a status update. It's much easier for the team too: nobody has to retell anything in DMs like before. Everyone sees the whole conversation history right away.
Chat management got easier
In Slack, it took extra effort to make sure everyone was in the right chats. We had to add people manually and keep track so no one was left out. Now I know that HR keeps an eye on group tags in Pachca, and the tags automatically add everyone to the right chats.
Here's our example:
When we set up a new process, like planning and approving a promotion or launching a new feature, we don't need to remember everyone and add them manually. We just add a few tags, say, for team leads, and we can be sure nobody's been left out
And it's great that adding a new person to the workspace is simpler too. They're automatically in all the right chats, and we don't have to overload them with lists like "Find these channels and join them."
We build our workflows around the team chat app
To avoid jumping between services, we bring everything important into Pachca. We set up integrations that send statuses from our monitoring tools and website straight to the team chat. For example, we set up notifications from the TeamStorm task tracker to get task status updates faster and more easily.
You could do this in Telegram too, but without threads and mixed in with personal messages, it turns into chaos that's hard to manage.
Tips for making the switch
- When you move your team over, set everyone up with group tags right away. What worked great for us: before the move, we listed all our channels (what each one is for and who needs to be there), then reviewed whether we actually needed them and brought only the useful ones into Pachca. After that, we followed the Help Center: we created employee groups and mapped out which chats each group needs, so everyone was added to them automatically.
- The people rolling out the software should be its advocates inside the company. Lead by example and use something you didn't use before. For us, that was cross-chat threads. That way, everyone picks it up little by little. Now I can see that everyone in the company uses them and understands why. If your company is big, recruit more "advocates," but don't go down the path of endless instructions. Very few people get excited about those.
- Don't be afraid to bring outsourcers, contractors and close partners into your team chat app as guests. Onboarding is really simple, with no lengthy setup or learning curve, and your external colleagues will feel the benefits of having conversations inside your workspace too.
