Karri was founded in 2016 to solve a challenge familiar to South African schools: collecting payments for fees, events and everyday school activities without adding to administrative pressure or relying on cash.

Its first solution, Karri Collections, gave schools a simpler way to create, send, track and reconcile payment requests, while enabling parents to pay securely through the Karri App. Today, Karri supports more than 2,000 schools and over one million parents across South Africa.

Since then, Karri has expanded beyond collections into a broader school payments ecosystem, including the parent-controlled Karri Card for children and Karri Cover, an education-focused insurance solution.

The company continues on a high-growth trajectory, one that quickly overpowered the capabilities of the tools Monica Conterato, Karri’s finance lead, relied on to forecast effectively.

When Conterato joined Karri two years ago, she inherited a spreadsheet-based forecasting system and a separate financial reporting tool made for accounting teams.

A tool that was too basic for an increasingly complex job

Conterato characterized the reporting tool she was using as good for its intended purpose but not very “operationally savvy,” adding that it didn’t do much to streamline her work. She said, “I tried to have one system where I didn't have to update multiple systems.” 

She thought she might be able to bring her forecast into the financial reporting tool, but its integrations were too limited to bring in all the data she needed. “I wanted to automate the forecast that we give to the business, and I couldn't get it done without constantly working around the system,” she said. 

To forecast effectively, Conterato needed to combine financial and non-financial data into one system. This is where she got stuck. Trying to make the reporting tool work for that purpose, she realized that "it just couldn't keep up."

A fragile spreadsheet, crumbling under the pressure of complexity

At the same time, the spreadsheet she was using for forecasting was breaking with all the changes in the business as its growth quickly accelerated. To give you a sense of how fast that acceleration has been, this year alone, Karri has three new products on the roadmap. 

With new products come new accounts, all of which have their own set of requirements. Trying to build all of that into a spreadsheet? Conterato said simply, “That was not fun.” 

“I need something that can change as fast as we are,” Conterato said. Like the reporting tool she was using, her spreadsheet couldn’t keep up with the company’s growing complexity, and together, they created a functional mismatch that forced her to rely on unscalable manual processes.

Team member or technology: a decision under pressure

Just one year into Conterato’s work at Karri and as she was trying to manage the increasing pressure of an ever-increasing manual workload, the company’s financial director announced she was moving on. Knowing that, upon her departure, the full responsibility for forecasting, reporting, and headcount planning would fall to Conterato, she was prepared to hire an FP&A specialist. 

However, Conterato knew finding the right person would take time. So she asked if they could first explore how they might instead use technology to fill the gap. Her financial director agreed, and mentioned that she attended an online conference where Drivetrain presented a demo. She was very impressed by what she saw, and with Conterato, began evaluating a shortlist of FP&A vendors. However, none of the other vendors they looked at were a culture fit or able to meet the bar Drivetrain set. 

So, they approached the CEO with their business case to purchase Drivetrain. Initially, he was skeptical. With the financial director about to exit, Conterato would be on her own for the implementation. But she’d done the math, and it was compelling: Drivetrain wouldn’t add to headcount and would eliminate the cost of the reporting tool that she would no longer need. 

Viewing Drivetrain as a strategic purchase, the CEO agreed, and Conterato started Karri’s implementation of Drivetrain not long after.

The Solution

Conterato didn't approach Drivetrain like a typical software implementation. Instead, she approached it like she was onboarding a hire.

This was a useful framing for Conterato: "So I trained it. I coached it. I put the effort that I would have done with a new hire into this." She set herself a hard internal deadline to have all management accounts fully migrated to Drivetrain within Q1, the same kind of deadline she'd hold any new employee to. And she hit it. "It was tough, but it was a lot of fun too," she said.

Conterato took a very hands-on approach to implementing Drivetrain, working with her implementation partner, Rama Krishna, to explore the platform and build out the system she needed. Referring to Krishna as her “onboarding buddy,” she said he was “absolutely amazing” and made learning Drivetrain quite enjoyable.

Proof under pressure

Once they got the foundation in place, Drivetrain quickly proved itself under real pressure. During a strategic meeting, Karri's CEO told Conterato that he had a banking partner conversation coming up in two days and needed a target forecast ready. 

While initially a bit intimidated by the task, Conterato realized that it was completely doable with Drivetrain. She thought to herself, "I'm okay, let's do this.” And then she did. With Drivetrain, she was able to build it and send it over the next day for his review, and her CEO walked into that meeting with numbers he trusted. Conterato said it was the kind of turnaround that used to require late nights stitching together spreadsheets. Now it happens inside a single system built for agility and speed.

Streamlined headcount planning

Before Drivetrain, the headcount planning lived on a standalone tab in a Google Sheet that Conterato had to update manually with data from the company’s HRIS system. Now that data flows in automatically through Karri's BambooHR integration.

Before Drivetrain, she had to track headcount changes and salary increases manually to keep her forecast up to date. Now, with Drivetrain, she just has to make sure that BambooHR is up to date and Drivetrain pulls it all into her forecast. She controls what the platform can change using permissions and can track every change made. “It's amazing,” she said, adding, “I'm so happy that Drivetrain is now doing it for me, and I don't have to remember who's getting an increase when.” 

Conterato said that with Drivetrain, headcount planning has become far less stressful, and certainly more streamlined. “It's kind of like a no-brainer now. It's just happening.”

Enhanced self-serve access

With Drivetrain, Conterato has been able to open new doors into the data different teams at Karri need, which has freed up a lot more of her time. Drivetrain makes this possible in a few different ways. 

One is that Drivetrain is a very flexible and easy platform to work with, both for finance and non-finance users alike. For example, Conterato created a team report in Drivetrain tailored for the marketing manager, who then further extended and customized it. "She was absolutely in love with it," said Conterato. 

Conterato said that, currently, the marketing manager is an exception, noting that not everyone has the time to learn a new software, even when it’s as easy as Drivetrain. This hasn’t slowed her down, though. Rather than distributing spreadsheets to the rest of the company, like she used to do, she just shares a link to the relevant data in Drivetrain, one more way to help leaders throughout the business engage with their data directly. 

She’s also leveraging Drivetrain’s Claude integration as another way to enhance self-serve access. Every team at Karri has access to Claude, and with Drivetrain’s MCP server, everyone can access the data in Drivetrain they’re allowed to see via Claude on their desktop. This allows them to simply ask Claude their questions and get the answers they need straight from the source.