Compound Planning: From Vendor Chaos to Compliance-Ready

RESULTS AT A GLANCE

• ~$25K saved/month  in recurring vendor savings
• 6.5–7%  reduction in total vendor spend
• 43 vendors  scoped for Reg S-P client PII compliance
• Hours, not weeks  to achieve full regulatory scoping
• Zero headcount added  to get procurement under control

The Challenge: Clarity at the Speed of Growth

Compound Planning is a fast-growing Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) headquartered in New York, NY. In September 2023, Compound entered into a merger, bringing together two companies, their teams, and their technology stacks almost overnight. The challenges for a finance leader during a merger include vendor relationships inherited mid-flight, contracts spread across multiple systems, and spend flowing through credit cards and bank accounts that predated any unified process. Getting to a single source of truth was the priority from day one.

When Joseph Silva, CPA, joined as Head of Finance in 2024, one of his priorities was to bring rigor to the vendor program. Like most fast-growing companies following a merger, Compound needed a single place where contracts, spend, and ownership could live together, and a foundation strong enough to support compliance policy.

“Vendor management before BRM was reactive. We learned of new vendors when we got invoiced or charged. There was a lack of transparency, a lack of ownership around contracts — it was just, 'we inherited these.’”

— Joseph Silva, CPA, Head of Finance, Compound Planning

The financial exposure was real. Spend was creeping upward, and the risk wasn’t just dollars. As a regulated RIA, Compound’s vendor relationships carry compliance obligations that, left unmanaged, can trigger regulatory findings. Joseph knew the company needed two things fast: a complete view of who they were paying, and a solid foundation on which to build policy.

Why BRM: The Missing Piece Between the ERP and Reality

Joseph evaluated the landscape carefully. He'd spent years at Palantir, where the concept of an 'ontology,' a connected web of relationships between entities, is foundational. His bar for good tooling was high. What he found in the market was mostly disappointing: ERPs focused on W9s and payment terms. Spend management tools surfaced transactions but missed contracts. CLMs sat with Legal and never talked to Finance. Nobody was building the vendor source of truth.

BRM's competitors were too narrowly focused on the procure-to-pay flow. “They rely on integrating with a CLM directly,” Joseph noted. “BRM bypasses that, effectively giving them the capabilities they needed in a CLM and a procurement platform in one.”

With no internal resources for a heavy implementation, Compound needed something that could start delivering value immediately, pulling in everything that existed, and then grow with them as their program matured. BRM connected to their ERP, corporate spend and card providers, their bank accounts, their inboxes, and started ingesting the full vendor picture from day one.

Chapter 1: Getting the Foundation Underneath Them

The first phase of Compound's BRM journey was simple but essential: get everything in. BRM's Contract Collector pulled in click-through agreements, active software subscriptions, and historical vendor records. No heavy implementation. No long onboarding cycle. 

How Compound Connected BRM on Day One

•  Email inbox crawler to capture agreements and click-throughs

•  Direct integration with Brex (later Ramp) for card spend

•  Bank account linkage for direct bank vendor payments

•  Custom fields built in settings within minutes — no IT involvement required

That complete vendor picture changed how the leadership team operated. Business leaders gained visibility into what the company was paying, what those tools actually did, and who owned them, and with that visibility came the ability to act with much more intention.

Chapter 2: Turning the Vendor Record Into a Compliance Asset

In mid-2024, Compound's Chief Compliance Officer raised a flag: Regulation (Reg) S-P, which requires RIAs and financial institutions to maintain documented policies around any vendor that processes or touches client PII, with defined response time requirements, remediation protocols, and data protection standards.

Most companies facing this kind of regulatory scoping would have spent months trying to get ready. They'd have sent out surveys. They'd have created new spreadsheets. They'd have emailed every department and hoped people responded.

Compound already had BRM.

How Compound Scoped 43 Vendors for Reg S-P in Hours

•  Step 1: Navigated to the Software Tooling tab in BRM — already organized and active

•  Step 2: Found the built-in PII field — already in the system

•  Step 3: Created a custom 'Financial Client Data' field in Settings in minutes

•  Step 4: Exported the active vendor list, divided it across the leadership team to tag client PII vendors

•  Step 5: Re-imported the tagged data back into BRM's compliance tab

•  Result: 43 vendors identified as in-scope for Reg S-P — full compliance foundation set

“We used BRM to identify vendors who touched client PII, and we found 43. That's 43 vendors we had to take a targeted approach on — putting together a policy, making sure we had the right response times, and getting the data addendum attached at renewal.”

— Joseph Silva, CPA, Head of Finance, Compound Planning

BRM also reduced the manual outreach burden by automatically surfacing publicly available SOC 2 reports and data retention policies from vendor websites. The compliance team didn't have to chase down publicly available certifications — BRM already had them.

Compound's approach to remediation is now built into their renewal motion. When a vendor who touches PII comes up for renewal, they're asked to sign a standard data addendum as a condition. Now, compliance is a commercial lever rather than a reactive scramble.

The Results: $25K Saved Per Month and a Compliance Foundation

~$25K

Saved per month

6.5–7%

Vendor spend reduction

43

Vendors scoped for Reg S-P

Vendor spend, which had been creeping upward, is now held flat even as Compound has continued adding tools. New vendors are evaluated intentionally, duplicate spend is caught early, and renewals are negotiated from a position of information rather than ignorance.

“We've been adding vendors since then, but we're more focused on them. We leveled ourselves back down, and we've been able to just hold it there. That's about $25K a month in savings without decreasing capacity or causing disruption to the business.”

— Joseph Silva, CPA, Head of Finance, Compound Planning

On the renewal side, BRM's early signals are turning reactive contract cycles into proactive negotiations. Joseph’s team is now able to see renewals coming with enough lead time to do something about them, rather than discovering a charge on the card.

“Sales teams get cute: 'We gave you three free months.' Now your renewal is a full 12 months; you just saw a 33% increase in cash outflows. Having that total annualized cost front and center, that's the thing that makes it where you don't have to constantly reread the PDF and reinterpret it when you know you're going to need it at renewal time.”

— Joseph Silva, CPA, Head of Finance, Compound Planning

Why They Renewed

When renewal time came, the decision was simple for Compound. The question wasn't whether BRM was delivering value; it was whether anything else in the market was even in the same conversation.

“There isn’t another tool that does this. Why pay for a CLM and a procurement platform when you can get it in one?”

— Joseph Silva, CPA, Head of Finance, Compound Planning

But Joseph also pointed to something less quantifiable, and arguably more important to long-term retention. For a finance leader at a fast-growing company, the partnership model matters as much as the product.

“The client service team matters. I weigh it equally, if not higher, than the price you pay, even as a finance professional. Knowing that you have someone on the ground that's really focused on delivering value is what makes a difference.”

— Joseph Silva, CPA, Head of Finance, Compound Planning

A Different Kind of Procurement Culture

One of the less obvious payoffs from getting vendor management under control is what it does to the culture around buying. When the whole organization can see what’s been purchased, what it costs, and when it renews, the procurement conversation shifts. Leaders take ownership. Duplicate requests get caught before they turn into duplicate invoices. And the finance team spends less time chasing information and more time acting on it.

Joseph draws an analogy to how mature sales organizations operate. The best ones build a deal scorecard — key terms, key economics, good-better-best benchmarks — and use it to train every rep, not just the most experienced ones. BRM is making that same shift possible on the buy side. Every business leader at Compound now has visibility into what the company owns, what it’s paying, and what leverage exists at renewal time. The finance team doesn’t have to carry the full weight of procurement alone.

“You're training your workforce to become better negotiators. It's not always the finance team bearing the weight — you're starting to build that counterpart to the sales side. And then you move away from zero-sum and into a more collaborative partnership with your vendors.”

— Joseph Silva, CPA, Head of Finance, Compound Planning

The Advice to Other Finance Leaders

If you’re a controller or finance professional and you can’t fully account for every vendor you’re paying – what they cost, when they renew, and whether you’re getting a fair deal – get BRM.

Joseph Silva, Head of Finance, Compound Planning