Frequently asked questions

Serana Partners is an embedded talent firm headquartered in Amsterdam with a delivery centre in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We give European scaleups, PE-backed groups and founder-led businesses two things they routinely struggle to hire and retain in-house: senior finance operations talent, and senior software engineering talent.

Our people work inside your systems, on your processes, reporting to your line managers, but they sit on our payroll, in our delivery centre, under our quality framework.

CFOs, finance directors and controllers running lean teams at fast-growing European businesses; CTOs and VP-Engineering leaders who need to scale capacity without the cost and lead time of hiring full-time engineers in Amsterdam, Berlin or London; and PE/holdco operators managing multi-entity portfolios where each company has its own books, its own stack, and no group view.

Our holding entity Serana Partners B.V. is registered in Amsterdam at Keizersgracht 391A, 1016 EJ. Client-facing partners are based in Amsterdam and Berlin. Delivery is handled through our wholly-owned subsidiary in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Serana is the ancient Arabic and Persian name for Sri Lanka, historically a trading hub built on connection, craftsmanship and reliability. The name reflects where our delivery team sits, and how we want to be experienced by clients.

No. Recruitment agencies place candidates onto your payroll and walk away. Our people remain Serana employees, managed by Serana: we handle onboarding, training, performance management, holiday cover, sick cover and replacements if anyone leaves. You get the output without the employer overhead.

No. Body shops sell hours and headcount. We sell outcomes: a closed month, a clean AR ledger, a shipped feature, a stable production environment. Pricing is built around the scope of work and seniority mix needed to deliver those outcomes, not a per-seat rate card.

It means our people work inside your business as if they were your own team. They use your email domain, your Slack or Teams workspace, your ERP, your ticketing system, your codebase, your stand-ups, your sprint planning. Your line managers give them work. They escalate to your stakeholders.

The only difference between them and a direct hire is that they sit on our payroll and we are accountable for their performance.

Traditional outsourcing wraps work behind a service desk: you submit a ticket, you wait, someone you've never spoken to processes it, and you get a result two days later. That works for high-volume, low-context tasks. It doesn't work for finance close cycles or product engineering, both of which need context, relationship and judgment.

Embedded means your accountant or engineer knows your business: knows that customer X always pays late, knows that the staging environment behaves oddly on Tuesdays, knows which Slack channel to ping when a supplier invoice looks wrong.

Fractional executives give you strategic oversight a few hours or days a week, excellent for board reporting, fundraising, and technology strategy. They are not built to run AP, chase debtors, push code, fix bugs or close the books. Serana sits in the operational layer underneath the fractional executive, and we work alongside fractional CFOs and CTOs all the time.

Yes, that's the entire point of the model. Within a few weeks of onboarding, our embedded staff are typically attending stand-ups, raising things in Slack, joining retros, getting tagged in PRs, and being introduced as 'our finance person in Colombo' or 'our backend engineer.' We encourage clients to treat them as full team members, including in off-sites and recognition.

Our team is based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and works European hours. Sri Lanka sits 3.5 hours ahead of CET, but because our team is contracted to European hours, there is no time-zone mismatch for clients to manage around. Staff are available in your Slack or Teams workspace in real time, joining your stand-ups live, and responding within the same business hours your in-house team operates.

Yes, fluently. Sri Lanka has English as a working business language and our hiring bar requires fluent professional English in writing and on calls. Most of our finance staff hold ACCA or CIMA qualifications, both taught and examined in English. Engineers go through a written and verbal English screen as part of the technical interview.

On-site presence is handled by our European managers: the Amsterdam and Berlin partners come to your office for kick-offs, governance reviews, escalations, quarterly business reviews, and any moment where face-to-face matters. That covers what most clients need.

Should you want a Colombo team member on-site, for an onboarding week, a systems migration, or an audit, this can be arranged. We handle the visa, travel and accommodation logistics; you cover the direct costs.

End-to-end day-to-day finance operations: pre-bookkeeping, accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank reconciliation, expense and credit card processing, payroll input preparation, monthly close, VAT preparation, lender and investor reporting, FP&A support, 13-week cash forecasts, budget vs. actuals commentary, and management reporting packs. Anything that lives in your finance function and recurs predictably is in scope.

We don't sign your statutory accounts, we don't act as your tax advisor, and we don't replace your auditor. In Germany, formal Buchhaltung sits with your Steuerberater: we handle pre-bookkeeping (sorting, coding, reconciling) and feed clean data through DATEV or similar to the Steuerberater who books and files. We work with your existing tax advisor or can refer you to one in our network.

For finance teams up to roughly five to seven FTEs, yes: we can run the full operational stack, with one of our senior leads handling the team and reporting into your CFO, FD or CEO. For larger functions we typically run alongside an in-house head of finance, taking over specific workstreams (close, AR, AP, FP&A) so the in-house team can focus on partnering, strategy and controls.

ERPs and accounting, AP/AR and expense, reporting and BI. We are tool-agnostic, if you use it, we'll work in it. We don't ask clients to migrate to our preferred stack.

Most clients target a working-day-five close; the more mature ones reach working-day-three. The actual timeline depends on business complexity, data quality, and how quickly your tax advisor turns around bookings. We'll diagnose your current close during onboarding, commit to a target, and track against it monthly.

This is where Serana earns its keep. We've built our reporting infrastructure around the holdco operating model: entity-by-entity P&Ls with intercompany eliminations, consolidated group reporting, MRR vs. project revenue splits, EBITDA bridges per entity, group liquidity overviews, and rolling 13-week cash forecasts at both entity and consolidated level.

Critically, our management reports are not a fixed template. We tune them to what your ExCo actually wants to debate each month, whether that's lagging-portfolio EBITDA bridges, NRR by entity, integration-cost realisation against synergy targets, or working-capital deep-dives. The goal is to surface the two or three things that warrant a decision and put them at the top of the pack.

Yes. We routinely handle intra-community supply rules, foreign VAT registrations, OSS/IOSS, reverse charge mechanics and country-specific filings across Germany, the Netherlands, France, the UK, Belgium, Spain and Italy. We don't file your returns (your local tax advisor does) but we prepare the underlying data, reconcile to the GL, and feed it through clean.

We produce the audit file (schedules, reconciliations, supporting documentation, sample selections) and manage the auditor relationship day-to-day during fieldwork. We handle auditor queries directly. You stay involved at the partner-meeting level; we handle everything underneath.

Yes. We've supported clients through Series A, B and C raises, refinancings, and PE secondary processes. We build the financial data room, populate the QofE workbook, respond to lender or investor queries, and clean up the historicals so they survive scrutiny. We typically work alongside a fractional CFO or M&A advisor on the strategic side.

Backend development, frontend development, full-stack development, mobile development, DevOps, SRE, QA and test automation, data engineering, ML/AI integration, and platform/infrastructure work. We staff specific roles within your engineering org, not consulting projects with deliverables and milestones.

If you would otherwise hire a senior backend engineer in Berlin and wait four months to fill the role, we put a senior backend engineer in your team next month.

If you're on a more specialised stack (Elixir, Rust, Scala) we can usually source, ask us.

Three layers. First, hiring: every engineer goes through a technical screen, a system design discussion and an English-language behavioural interview before being hired by Serana, then shortlisted candidates are interviewed by you before any deployment, exactly as for a direct hire.

Second, ongoing: our delivery leads pair-review work, run weekly one-to-ones, and track output against agreed KPIs. Third, client-side: our engineers participate in your existing code reviews and PR approvals so quality issues surface in your process and get fixed at source.

Three differences worth understanding. First, model: most competitors are staff-augmentation businesses with a recruitment-agency commercial model. We're built around outcomes, not headcount. Second, integration: we run finance and engineering under one roof, important for holdcos where both are non-core costs. Third, governance: European partners with operational backgrounds in finance and engineering, not sales, own every client relationship and stay involved.

We can, but it's usually not the right shape of engagement. Greenfield product builds are best done with a product engineering studio that owns scope and timeline. What we do well is ongoing engineering capacity inside an existing org: shipping features alongside your in-house team, owning specific services, scaling test coverage, hardening infrastructure, paying down tech debt.

Yes, exactly like any other engineer on your team. They get GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket access, open PRs, get reviewed by your tech leads, and ship. The only difference from a direct hire is the contractual relationship.

Engagement-dependent. For feature-development engagements we're not on the on-call rota. For SRE, DevOps or platform engagements we participate in your on-call rotation against an agreed schedule and compensation framework. For business-critical incidents during European working hours we're available regardless.

Yes, that's a core part of the model. You can add engineers within four to eight weeks (faster if we have warm bench in the right stack), and scale down with 30 to 60 days' notice. This is materially faster, in both directions, than hiring or letting go in Germany or the Netherlands.

We use a three-phase approach.

For finance engagements: a senior delivery lead in Colombo who runs the operational team, and a partner-level relationship owner in Europe. For engineering: an engineering lead in Colombo and a partner-level relationship owner in Europe.

The European relationship owner is your escalation path, your QBR partner and your point of contact for scope changes. The Colombo lead is your point of contact for day-to-day work.

Weekly operational sync between your team and our delivery lead. Monthly business review with the partner-level relationship owner. Quarterly strategic review covering scope, pricing, KPIs and roadmap. Plus ad-hoc on Slack, Teams or email whenever you need us.

Finance: working-day close timing, AR days outstanding, AP days outstanding, reporting accuracy (zero post-close adjustments target), and ticket/query response time. Engineering: sprint commit accuracy, PR cycle time, defect escape rate, deployment frequency, on-call resolution time. We agree the specific KPI set during onboarding and report against it monthly.

Tell us and we'll replace them, on us, not you. We handle the swap, manage the handover, and cover the ramp-up cost so you're not paying for the new person to learn what the old one already knew. Replacements are rare but our model is built around the assumption that they will happen.

Every engagement is staffed with deliberate redundancy. Your delivery lead has a backup who is briefed on your business and joins enough of the operational rhythm to step in seamlessly. Holiday cover is part of the contracted scope, you don't pay extra. If a lead leaves Serana entirely, the European relationship owner runs the transition personally.

Every Serana employee signs an employment contract with confidentiality, non-disclosure and IP assignment clauses. Each engagement is also covered by a master services agreement with project-specific NDAs where required. IP created during your engagement is yours, Serana retains no rights to client code, client data, client documents or client work product.

In your systems, on your infrastructure. Our model is explicitly that we work in your tools: your ERP, your data warehouse, your code repos, your file storage. We don't pull your data into Serana systems. The only data that lives at Serana is what's needed to manage the engagement (contracts, invoices, internal performance notes).

Yes. We operate under GDPR for all European clients. Sri Lanka is covered under standard contractual clauses (SCCs), which we sign as part of every client agreement. Personal data processing is documented per engagement, and our Colombo office operates a data protection regime aligned with GDPR principles.

We are working towards ISO 27001 certification. For clients requiring formal SOC 2 or equivalent attestation today, we can provide a control framework mapping and answer due diligence questionnaires. Our delivery centre operates with badge-controlled access, logged workstations, full-disk encryption, MFA on all accounts, and monitored network egress.

You provision access using your own identity provider (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace), exactly as for an employee. You revoke access when the engagement ends, when someone leaves Serana, or whenever you choose. We strongly encourage SSO, MFA and least-privilege role assignment, and we'll help you design that for our access if you don't have it set up.

Only with your explicit approval. Our default position is that we do not deploy any AI tooling on a client engagement until the client has reviewed and agreed to a written AI usage policy specific to that engagement. If you want a fully AI-free engagement (no copilots, no transcription tools, no automated coding assistance, no LLM-based document extraction) we run it that way and our staff are contractually bound by that policy.

When clients ask us to recommend a default, it looks like this.

Finance: AI-assisted first-pass invoice coding, document extraction from PDFs, draft commentary writing for management reports, and reconciliation matching, all with mandatory human review before anything is posted, sent or filed.

Engineering: AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) used for boilerplate, test generation, refactoring assistance and code search, with all output reviewed through your normal PR process.

We document the specific tools, use cases and human-review checkpoints in a one-page AI policy attached to your MSA. Nothing is implemented without your written sign-off.

Yes, and we make this easy. You can ban specific vendors (e.g. no OpenAI, no Anthropic, no Google), specific categories (e.g. no transcription tools in meetings), specific data types (e.g. no AI processing of customer PII), or specific workflows. Restrictions are written into your engagement-specific AI policy and enforced by our delivery leads. Compliance is auditable.

No. We exclusively use enterprise-tier AI products that contractually exclude customer data from being used as training data, for example, the enterprise tiers of OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub Copilot for Business, and Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. We do not use consumer-tier or free-tier AI products on client work. We can share the data processing addenda from our AI vendors on request.

It depends on the tool, and we'll tell you exactly where for each one. Most enterprise AI vendors offer EU data residency options and we configure those by default for European clients. If you require strict EU-only processing, we can scope the engagement around tools that meet that bar, there are fewer of them, but they exist, and we'll tell you upfront if any productivity trade-off is involved.

Only if you allow it, and only within the boundaries you set. Many clients explicitly want their engineers using modern AI coding assistants because the productivity uplift is real. Other clients restrict it, for regulated workloads, IP-sensitive codebases, or as a matter of policy. We're equally comfortable either way. Whatever you decide is captured in writing, briefed to the engineer at onboarding, and enforced through our delivery oversight.

We don't deploy meeting AI (Otter, Fireflies, Read.ai, Granola, Gemini meeting notes, Microsoft Copilot recap, etc.) on client calls unless you specifically request it. If you want all internal Serana calls about your engagement to be AI-free as well, that's a policy we can hold ourselves to.

Every Serana employee completes internal AI policy training at onboarding, covering acceptable use, data classification, vendor restrictions, prompt hygiene (never paste client data into a personal account), and the requirement to default to client-specific policy over our internal default. We refresh the training annually and whenever a client policy changes materially. Delivery leads spot-check compliance.

We are, not the tool. AI is treated as a productivity layer underneath human work, not a substitute for human judgment. Every AI-assisted output passes through human review before it reaches your books, your codebase or your stakeholders. We carry professional indemnity insurance that covers errors arising from AI-assisted work in the same way it covers any other delivery work.

Yes. We maintain an internal log of which AI tools are configured for which engagements, which use cases they cover, and which human-review checkpoints apply. Clients can request the log for their engagement at any time, and we treat AI usage as part of any client audit of our delivery practices.

Yes. Clients can and do visit our Colombo office, audit our access controls, review our employment contracts, and inspect our security configuration. We treat client audits as part of doing business, not as exceptions.

We price around scope, not seats. After the diagnostic we propose a monthly fee that reflects the scope of work, the seniority mix needed, and the expected volume. There's a one-time onboarding fee for setup and transition. The monthly fee flexes up or down as your needs change, we don't lock you into rigid headcount commitments.

Yes, typically around 40% cheaper than the fully-loaded cost of an equivalent in-house European hire, once you include base salary, employer social charges, holiday cover, recruitment cost, training and management overhead. The cost saving is real, but it's not the primary reason most clients choose us. Speed, flexibility and senior capability tend to matter more.

Three-month trial period to start, after which the engagement runs open-ended. Either party can exit with three months' written notice. We review the SLA and pricing every twelve months. No long-term lock-ins, no exit penalties, no minimum-spend clauses.

Yes, a one-time fee covering the diagnostic, systems access setup, knowledge transfer, documentation and the first month of ramp. The amount depends on engagement complexity and is stated transparently in the proposal.

Yes. All client contracts and invoices are in EUR. Payment terms are typically 14 to 30 days from invoice date.

That's how most engagements begin. Many clients start with a single workstream (month-end close, AR management, or a single backend engineer) and expand once trust is established. There is no minimum engagement size that excludes legitimate businesses.

Travel and accommodation for on-site visits at your request, subscription costs to your own software (we use your licences), and any third-party tools you choose to procure separately. Everything else (recruitment, training, holiday cover, sick cover, replacement, performance management, payroll taxes) is included.

Big Four outsourcing is built for large enterprises with thousands of transactions and the procurement maturity to manage a complex MSA. Their pricing and delivery model reflects that. We're built for the segment underneath: scaleups, founder-led companies and PE-backed groups in the €5m to €250m revenue range, where the CFO wants a partner they can call directly, not a key account manager.

Freelancer platforms put relationship management, quality control, replacement risk and continuity risk on you. We carry all of that (the talent contract, performance management, replacement risk, holiday cover) so your only job is to use the output.

Accountancy firms are excellent at statutory accounts, tax, audit and compliance, and we work with them, not against them. They're not built for daily operational finance: chasing AR, processing AP, running the close, building dashboards, managing cash. That's our zone. Most of our clients use a Steuerberater, an accountant, or an audit firm alongside Serana, the relationships are complementary.

Yes, the majority of our finance engagements run alongside an in-house head of finance or controller. The split varies: sometimes we own a full workstream (e.g. AP and AR), sometimes we provide capacity around peak periods (close, audit, budget season), sometimes we run the operational layer while the in-house team focuses on partnering and strategy. We design the split with you.

A 30 to 60 minute call with one of the partners. We'll ask about your current setup, pain points, timeline and priorities. You can ask us anything. There's no commitment, no proposal pressure, and no follow-up sales sequence if it's not the right fit. About a third of these calls end with us pointing the prospect toward someone else, and we're fine with that.

For a first conversation, nothing, just bring the problems. For a written proposal, we typically ask for your last reporting pack or technical architecture overview, your chart of accounts or codebase structure, your key deadlines and pain points, and a list of systems in scope. We'll send a short discovery questionnaire after the first call.

Discovery to first day on the tools is typically four to eight weeks for finance engagements and four to ten weeks for engineering, depending on seniority and skill scarcity. If you have an urgent need (outgoing finance team, departing tech lead, audit deadline) tell us upfront and we'll be honest about what's achievable.

Start with a discovery call anyway. If after the call you decide it's not the right time, we'll stay in touch on a quarterly basis without pressure, and you can come back when the timing is right.

Email info@seranapartners.com for general enquiries, or book a discovery call via the Contact page.