How Kettleby Freight retired 14 spreadsheets in a quarter

Fourteen files, one owner each

At the end of 2025, Kettleby’s finance operations team ran its month on 14 spreadsheets. Carrier invoices were checked against rate cards by hand. Demurrage disputes lived in a shared workbook with 40 tabs. Freight accruals were rebuilt every month from a Snowflake export, and each file had exactly one person who understood it.

“When someone was on leave, that process stopped,” says Dana Okafor, Finance Operations Lead. “When an auditor asked who changed a rate, we couldn’t say.”

Engineering had a two-quarter backlog, so any request for new tooling would have waited until the summer. The team had tried a form builder the year before, but IT blocked it because nobody could say where the data went.

One app a week, starting with rates

Dana’s team opened the Bench in January and started with the file that hurt most: carrier rate approvals. The first prompt was one paragraph. It asked for a queue of carrier invoices from the transport management system’s Postgres database, a check against the agreed rate card, and a second approver for any variance over €500.

The first working version arrived 12 minutes later. The team spent the rest of the week on edge cases like currency conversion, partial shipments and credit notes. By Friday, Rate Desk was live for 22 people.

The other 13 apps followed at about one a week. Accruals moved to a scheduled Job that reads Snowflake every night and writes a job sheet the controller reviews each morning. Demurrage disputes became a queue, with the supporting documents stored in Amazon S3. Approval requests post to Slack, so approvers don’t have to watch a dashboard.

Named approvers from the first release

Kettleby’s IT team set two conditions before rollout. Every app needed a named owner, and nothing could reach production without a Sign-off.

Tolerances covered both. Access follows Kettleby’s existing Microsoft Entra ID groups, so a new analyst gets the right apps on day one and loses them the day they leave. Every release goes through a Sign-off with a diff, and the Logbook records who approved it. One Spec, written as a single sentence, keeps supplier bank details out of every app the team builds.

“IT stopped asking whether finance could be trusted with its own tools,” Dana says. “They can see exactly what we shipped and who approved it.”

What changed

• 14 spreadsheet processes retired in one quarter

• Month-end close down from 9 working days to 3

• €310,000 in carrier overbilling caught in the first six months

The team runs 14 apps today, with 5 builders and 160 members. Next on the list is a shared dock schedule for the warehouse team in Venlo, which will reuse the same approvers and access groups.