Medical education
How Medway kept finance lean while its student base grew 50% a year
“In a short time, we were able to make a series of improvements in the team without a relevant increase in investment or headcount. People who used to spend the day working in spreadsheets are now thinking about process improvements.” — Carlos Augusto Minoru Kubo, CFO at Medway
TL;DR
- Company: Medway — a medical education company that supports professionals across different stages of their careers
- Growth: about 50% a year in the student base over the last three years
- Challenge: connecting finance subsystems, reducing manual interventions, and keeping up with growth without scaling costs and headcount at the same pace
- Automation: integration of approvals, expenses, and budget vs. actuals tracking with Omie and the rest of the finance processes
- Highlight: a chatbot that lets managers query financial information directly, without analyzing spreadsheets or large datasets
- Result: the same lean structure from two years earlier, now with people more dedicated to analysis and process improvement
- Strategic impact: more visibility into budget vs. actuals and greater finance participation in decisions on efficiency, margin, and capital allocation
- Next fronts: making the chatbot easier to access, integrating contract information, and expanding automation of operational work
Who Medway is
Medway is a medical education company that uses technology, its own methodology, and a network of medical professionals to support students across different stages of their careers.
In recent years, the company expanded its reach, portfolio, and the conditions it offers to serve audiences with different profiles and career moments. That movement showed up directly in student-base growth, which advanced about 50% a year for three consecutive years.
For finance, that pace created a clear challenge: sustain a larger and more complex operation without increasing tools, expenses, and headcount at the same rate.
Led by Carlos Augusto Minoru Kubo, CFO at Medway, the finance team has eight people across accounts payable, expenses, accounting, billing, collections, and reconciliations.
The challenge: many systems, little integration
As the company grew, finance hired different subsystems to meet operational needs. Purchasing, approvals, contracts, and records in Omie were part of the same finance journey, but the steps were not necessarily connected.
In practice, the finance team had to make sure information moved through every stage of the process by hand.
The main bottlenecks included:
- data spread across systems and spreadsheets;
- approvals tracked in separate tools;
- manual postings, checks, and consolidations;
- specific rules for different finance processes;
- budget vs. actuals tracking concentrated in finance;
- little participation from area managers in analyzing their own variances.
“We hired several subsystems inside the Finance pipeline, but they were not necessarily connected. That created a lot of manual work and required human intervention to make sure every step was completed.” — Carlos Kubo
Beyond the time it consumed, this model limited finance’s ability to support the rest of the company. Skilled people stayed busy preparing information, while analysis, improvements, and decisions competed with the operational routine.
Why Medway chose Abstra
Medway already knew Abstra from a previous experience in Marketing and CRM. When it was time to evolve the finance operation, the company evaluated other solutions on the market.
The challenge was not just replacing a tool. Medway needed to connect processes that followed their own rules and keep evolving the flows as the business changed.
The flexibility to build solutions adapted to the operation, with autonomy for the team and technical support from Abstra, was decisive.
“Given the team’s technical limitation, the capacity taken up by operational work, and the need to keep up with the evolution of the business, we understood that Abstra offered the best cost-benefit and the greatest advantages among the solutions we evaluated.” — Carlos Kubo
From process automation to a connected operation
With Abstra, Medway started integrating steps that used to depend on manual handoffs between different tools.
The fronts Carlos highlights include:
- expense management and approval;
- integration of approvals with records in Omie;
- consolidation and tracking of budget versus actuals;
- dashboards and financial queries for other departments.
Instead of eliminating every existing system, Medway used Abstra to connect them and move information in a more structured way. The subsystems kept existing, but started operating as part of more integrated flows.
“Today we still use a large part of the subsystems we hired, but in a much more integrated way. Approval flows and the recording of information became more tightly connected.” — Carlos Kubo
The chatbot that took financial information to managers
Among the projects, Carlos highlights budget vs. actuals tracking and the finance chatbot as the examples that best represent the transformation.
Before, budget analysis required finance to structure the information and distribute spreadsheets to managers. Beyond the preparation work, the format made it hard to navigate for people who were not familiar with the tools used by the team.
With Abstra, the information started showing up in reports, charts, dashboards, and filters accessible through a link shared in the company’s communication channel.
The chatbot went one step further: the manager does not need to scan rows or consume a large dataset to find an answer. They can ask a question about the point they want to analyze and receive the corresponding information directly.
“The chatbot removes the manager’s work of looking at the numbers line by line. They ask what they care about and get a more assertive answer, without having to consume that entire database of information that often is not relevant to them.” — Carlos Kubo
The project was well received by other departments because it made financial information simpler to query and increased the areas’ responsibility for their own budget variances.
50% yearly growth with the same lean structure
The most concrete impact shows up in finance’s ability to keep up with Medway’s growth.
Over the last three years, the student base grew about 50% a year. Even so, the company kept a lean finance structure, similar to the one it had two years earlier, without having to scale tools, expenses, or headcount at the same pace.
The mix of work, however, changed.
Activities that used to require constant dedication to spreadsheets and manual interventions started being executed or supported by automated flows. As a result, people on the team were reallocated to analysis and continuous process improvement.
“Today we have the same lean structure from two years ago, but these people are allocated to much more analytical activities than before we used the technology.” — Carlos Kubo
Although Medway has not yet consolidated a pencil-and-paper ROI calculation, Carlos sees a clear return: the platform fills a technical gap, frees team capacity, and lets the operation scale with the growth of the business.
Before and after
| Indicator | Before Abstra | After Abstra |
|---|---|---|
| Operational growth | More volume meant more pressure on manual processes | Student base growing about 50% a year with a lean structure |
| Finance systems | Separate, poorly integrated subsystems | Processes connected by flows built in Abstra |
| Budget vs. actuals | Preparing and distributing spreadsheets | Dashboards, charts, and filters accessible to the areas |
| Manager queries | Dependence on large datasets and finance support | Direct questions to the chatbot and more assertive answers |
| Ownership of variances | Tracking concentrated in finance | Managers with more access and responsibility for their numbers |
| Role of the team | Heavy dedication to spreadsheets and operational work | More time for analysis and process improvement |
| Structure | Potential need to grow with volume | Structure similar to two years earlier |
When efficiency and margin moved to the center of strategy
For a large part of Medway’s journey, the company’s main success metric was growth in sales and student numbers.
About a year and a half ago, the strategy started putting more weight on efficiency, margin growth, and conscious use of capital.
That shift increased finance’s participation in company decisions. To contribute effectively, though, the team needed to turn financial data into information other departments could actually use.
Automating budget vs. actuals reports helped build that bridge. Instead of centralizing the reading in finance, Medway started giving managers simpler ways to follow the financial health of their areas and understand variances.
“We were able to translate the information in a palatable and didactic way for the other areas. Nobody needs to open a spreadsheet to look at the numbers anymore: the manager accesses reports, charts, dashboards, and filters with what they need to understand the financial health of their area.” — Carlos Kubo
For Carlos, that was one of the main gains of the partnership: the technology not only increased internal efficiency, it also let Finance add value in a strategic shift for the company.
Automation that has to create value for the whole company
Medway uses a prioritization matrix to decide which processes should be automated.
Projects are evaluated on two dimensions:
- how much they increase the efficiency of the finance team itself;
- how much they improve the experience and work of internal customers — the other areas of the company.
An automation that reduces effort inside finance is relevant. But when it also removes bureaucracy for other areas and contributes to company results, it gets priority.
“It is important to think about how to improve our own work with automation. Even more important is improving the life of our internal customer, taking bureaucracy out of Finance so the other areas can focus on what delivers value for the company.” — Carlos Kubo
That logic avoids automating for the sake of technology. Every new project has to answer how it frees finance capacity and how it improves the way the business works.
A change of profile and culture in finance
For Medway, the main result of the partnership can be summarized in one word: transformation.
It shows up in the team’s technical evolution, in the maturity to identify opportunities, and in a change of profile for the professionals. Automation started being seen as a viable alternative for different activities, without requiring finance to become a team of developers.
“Transformation means evolution, maturity, experience gained, and a cultural shift in the finance team itself. We started seeing the efficiency we can gain with a scalable and friendly tool, without needing to be a developer or programmer.” — Carlos Kubo
Implementation speed also mattered. In a few months, the area was able to show concrete progress without compromising other deliveries and without creating a parallel technical structure.
What comes next
Medway plans to expand its use of Abstra in three main directions, all mentioned by Carlos during the interview.
More direct access to the chatbot
The next evolution is to let managers query the chatbot directly in the communication channel they already use, without having to open another platform. The expectation is to reduce friction even further and expand the use of financial information in real time.
Integration with the contracts process
The contracts tool will continue to be used, but it will be integrated with Abstra to extract and make information available. That way, requesting areas will be able to follow contract progress, while finance reduces its dependence on manual queries to legal.
A new purchasing flow
Medway’s own team built, in Abstra, a solution to replace the internal purchasing tool. The project is in a testing phase.
Beyond these fronts, finance keeps mapping operational activities that can be optimized with automation and AI.
A finance team ready for Medway’s next phase
Medway’s experience shows that scaling finance does not mean growing the structure at the same speed as the business.
By connecting systems, automating operational steps, and making information more accessible, the company sustained three years of accelerated growth with a lean team.
The main effect is not only in the tasks that stopped being manual. It is in the work that started occupying the team’s time: analysis, process improvement, and support for decisions on efficiency, margin, and capital.
The same technology that helps Medway expand access to medical education also started supporting a more integrated, analytical finance operation, ready to grow.
“Transformation means evolution, maturity, and a cultural shift in finance. In a short time, we were able to improve processes, gain scale, and get the team thinking more about analysis and improvement than about spreadsheets.”
Carlos Augusto Minoru Kubo
CFO
Medway
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