How Lessen Saved a Week Every Month on Cash Reporting

The Problem

Lessen is a technology-enabled property services platform helping real estate owners manage maintenance, renovations, and property turns at scale. As the business grew, finance had to keep pace with larger volumes of inflows and outflows, daily liquidity oversight, and investor reporting requirements, all across multiple bank accounts.

Joe Schneider, Senior Finance Manager, supports Lessen’s commercial business unit and owns a significant part of the day-to-day reporting workflow used to monitor balances, track movement, and explain changes when leadership needs answers fast.

Before Obol, cash reporting at Lessen relied on a manual workflow that consumed real time and made daily decisions harder:

• Bank activity was pulled on a biweekly cadence across several bank accounts, which meant the “current view” often lagged behind.
• Every reporting cycle started with exports and imports. Balances and transactions had to be downloaded, consolidated, and organized before anyone could even interpret what moved.
• Transaction tagging was the bottleneck. Bank descriptions were long and inconsistent, so the team spent hours categorizing activity just to get a usable view of inflows, outflows, and drivers.
• Answering leadership questions required digging. When the CFO asked why cash was down or where the movement came from, it triggered manual investigation instead of a quick, confident explanation.
• Idle balances were harder to spot and act on. Without a consistent daily picture, operating cash could sit longer than it should instead of being evaluated for interest-bearing placement.

The Solution

Lessen implemented Obol to replace a manual, reactive reporting process with a structured, daily cash operating system.

The goal was not just better visibility, but a workflow that finance could rely on every day without rebuilding context, exporting data, or spending time validating numbers before acting on them.

The team focused on three core outcomes:

• Institutionalizing daily cash visibility across all accounts so finance always knows where cash stands today, not at the last reporting cut
• Reducing manual effort tied to transaction review and categorization, which had become a recurring time drain
• Supporting real operational decisions around payables, liquidity, and short-term investing using a single source of truth

Obol became the layer Lessen uses to monitor actual cash movement, track balances in real time, and explain changes clearly to leadership and investors.

From Periodic Reporting to Daily Cash Operations

After implementing Obol, Lessen moved away from periodic cash reporting and into a daily operating workflow built on real-time visibility. Instead of rebuilding the cash picture during reporting cycles, the finance team now starts with a current view of balances, inflows, and outflows across all accounts. This made cash monitoring part of the daily workflow rather than a reporting exercise, and removed the lag between when activity happens and when it’s understood.

With Obol in place, several day-to-day processes changed materially:

• Immediate daily visibility into cash across all accounts, showing what came in, what went out, and where balances stand without waiting for exports or updates
• Automated transaction organization through rule-based tagging, eliminating hours of manual cleanup and reducing review and error risk
• Faster explanations for leadership, with balance movement and drivers already visible instead of being reconstructed on demand
• Operational decision support through Cash Bridge, helping guide payables sequencing and liquidity decisions using a shared view
• More proactive liquidity management, enabling excess operating balances to be identified and moved into interest-bearing accounts
• Earlier identification of hidden cash items, including millions tied to uncleared checks, improving the assessment of available funds

Business Impact

• Approximately a week saved each month by removing manual exporting, tagging, and repetitive review.
• Daily cash visibility across two banks and six to seven accounts embedded into regular operations.
• Faster, lower-effort responses to leadership and investor questions.
• More proactive liquidity decisions, including shifting excess funds into interest-bearing accounts.
• Improved accuracy around available cash, including surfacing millions tied to uncleared checks.