What I do
Three things. A fixed-price AI assessment for finance teams that know AI can do more than they currently get out of it, but don’t know where to start. The assessment delivers a 90-day roadmap with three prioritized use cases and a business case for each.
With clients we build out use cases in Saldus.ai — the audit-grade AI platform for finance. Connected to Exact Online, MS365, Google Workspace; with guardrails, approvals, and an audit trail from day 1. Model choice per agent, EU-hosting, no training on client data.
And I write — 29 longreads to date, grouped into 7 clusters from getting started to specific use cases. Freely accessible, no email gate, no vendor pitch. Goal: that the audience can get started themselves, with or without Start 2 Scale.
Background
Before Start 2 Scale I was CFO at multiple scale-ups and a management consultant at a Big-4 firm. I know the difference between a polished AI pitch deck and a working month-end close.
- 15+ years in finance — controller, finance manager, CFO
- RC (Register Controller) — Dutch post-graduate finance qualification
- Big-4 consulting — strategy and operations for SME and scale-up
- Scale-up CFO at multiple companies
My LinkedIn profile with full CV: www.linkedin.com/in/hvanderzande/
How I work
Four principles I steer by:
- Business case first, model later.Never “what can AI do?”, always “what does this process cost you right now — in hours, in money, in nights of poor sleep?”. Only then the solution. Sometimes that’s an agent. Sometimes a macro.
- Vendor-neutral advice. The assessment is deliberately independent. Sometimes the recommendation is: build it yourself, or choose tool X. Often a Saldus implementation follows — but only when the business case holds. No mandatory follow-up sprint.
- Audit-grade from day one.In Saldus every AI action is traceable to a prompt, a dataset, an approver. No black box. No “AI did something”. That’s what your accountant, auditor and you yourself need to build trust.
- Human-in-the-loop where needed, automated where possible. Default guardrails: ● auto within limit, ◐ review outside the bandwidth, ○ blocked where policy refuses.
Contact
30 minutes to introduce ourselves, no sales pitch — I explain how we work, you tell me where the pain points and opportunities sit.