Cfo Thought Leader

When Envoy CFO Sinohe Terrero is asked about his career chapter at Etsy, the online marketplace founded in 2005 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, he begins by explaining how back in 2008 Etsy’s finance function was really just a loose grouping of tools and people. “I'll never forget that I once had to go meet the bookkeeper, and he was like in Coney Island,” explains Terrero, who says that the financial mind-set at Etsy during its early days was that data trumps accounting—or, to put it another way, that data was strategic to the business and therefore should be kept in-house, whereas accounting could be outsourced to Coney Island or wherever. “Etsy was a marketplace, so the transactions occurred in big volumes, but we didn't send invoices. We didn't really have AR. Everything is paid by credit card on the Web,” points out Terrero, who quickly became tasked with establishing more traditional processes in preparation for bringing the accounting function back in-house. “Because of the nature of Etsy’s bu