AN ACCOUNTING FIRM BUILT FOR A SECTOR THAT IS MOVING FAST
Padel is growing faster than the finance advice available to it. We work only with operators, and we bring the reporting expectations of investor-backed growth businesses to a sector that is in its infancy, and we report it in terms an operator can actually use.
Accounting should be the best conversation of your month
For most operators, accounting is a chore. A deadline, a bill, and a set of accounts that arrives long after it could have changed anything.
It should be the opposite. Your numbers are the story of what is actually happening in your venue: which nights are filling, what a court hour really earns, whether the coaching programme is paying for itself, what the next site would need to work. If you love what you do, that is genuinely interesting, and finding it out should be something you look forward to rather than something you put off.
So we set out to make it delightful. Numbers that arrive early enough to act on, presented so you can read them in a few minutes, and someone on hand to tell you what they mean. The accounting profession has spent a long time making this dull. It does not have to be.
Three things we hold ourselves to
Every practice claims these. What matters is what makes them possible, so each one comes with the reason we can deliver it.
Numbers early enough to act on. A decision you make in March cannot be informed by February arriving in June, so the close lands in the first days of the month rather than a quarter later.
We know process, technology, data and AI, and lean on all four heavily. That is what condenses the timeline and lands the close in days rather than weeks, while the numbers still matter.
Reporting built around courts and utilisation rather than generic templates, on the measures that decide whether a venue works. We shape it around how your business actually works.
Padel is all we do, so we fixate on the unit economics and KPIs that matter. We know investors well, so the data is set up for them from the start and you walk into those meetings equipped to tell the story.
You always know what is happening and when. Questions get answered promptly, and where we do not have the answer yet, you hear where it has got to rather than nothing at all. All of it in plain English, not accounting jargon.
We agree at the start what good communication looks like to you, and work the way you already do, whether that is Slack, email, WhatsApp or a call in the diary.
Accountant first. Also speaker, writer, judge, host and podcaster on the future of accountancy.
A career inside growth businesses, now pointed at padel
Alastair Barlow co-founded flinder and ran it as CEO for eight years, building an outsourced finance function business for fast-growth venture-backed businesses to fifty people before exiting in 2024. Before that, sixteen years at PwC in the UK and the Netherlands, including three leading its outsourced finance business in London, alongside interim CFO work through fundraises, board reporting and due diligence.
What carried across is the useful part: performance reporting for businesses that are growing quickly, finance built around what an operator is actually trying to achieve rather than around a filing deadline, and knowing how to get the best out of the technology, AI and the data a business already produces.
Padel is the next one of those sectors, and an obvious place to put that experience. A lot happening in each business, growing faster than the advice available to it, and a sport he enjoys.
(Greater London)
Tell us about your operations and we will tell you what plan you need
Accountants
