How KLEI Replaced Financial Guesswork With Real-Time Clarity
KLEI makes stickers — not mass-produced ones, but durable, carefully finished ones, out of Ukraine. Founded in 2017 by Mykyta Anikanov, the company started as a ten-person operation that felt more like a family than a business. It grew fast: orders came in from international clients including Reface, Wix, Banda Agency, and Wikimedia, and customers as far away as Canada were willing to wait weeks for delivery without any additional marketing spend.
“I open Finmap, see the balance, upcoming expenses, still in the black — and move on.”
— Mykyta Anikanov, Founder, KLEI
Challenge
Growth didn't come with visibility. KLEI's finances lived across separate bank accounts, spreadsheets, and Anikanov's own mental notes. Orders varied wildly — from single stickers to runs of 10,000, contour-cut, bundled, or corporate — and each order type carried its own cost structure that the team couldn't easily see. Mixed payment methods created cash gaps, and as the bank balance crept toward zero even while orders kept increasing, Anikanov couldn't answer the basic question: was KLEI actually profitable, or just busy?
"Finances have always been my weak point — it was really difficult for me," he says. The stress had a rhythm to it: "Before, I'd be calm for two days and then stressed for two weeks. Now it's the opposite — I'm always calm."
Solution
KLEI implemented Finmap in autumn 2021 and used it to consolidate every account, spreadsheet, and mental note into one place, with a live balance and payment calendar replacing the after-the-fact snapshot the team used to piece together. Two changes stood out.
First, once Finmap made receivables visible, the team spotted a pattern of late-paying clients and moved the business to a prepayment-only policy. "After implementing financial management, I saw in Finmap that we really had receivables. So we just said: okay, from now on — prepayment only," Anikanov says.
Second, KLEI built a category structure inside Finmap — separate categories for individual stickers and sticker packs — so it could finally see which order types were actually profitable rather than judging the business by the total balance alone. "Before, we just looked at the total: money came in — so we were fine. But once we started dividing by order types, we saw that not everything was equally profitable," he says.
He also built a routine around the system rather than treating it as a one-time fix: "Spend time on finances weekly. Even 30 minutes analyzing the numbers gives you more than guesses or gut feeling. A founder should know what every number means — and make decisions based on facts."
Results
The clearest change is how Anikanov starts his day now. "I open Finmap, see the balance, upcoming expenses, still in the black — and move on. Before, I had to check three bank accounts, spreadsheets, notes — and still be unsure," he says.
That shift from checking three places to checking one freed up time and attention that used to go into financial anxiety. By 2025, KLEI had raised investment and begun building its own production facility, opened new accounts, and put a new financial structure in place to match its growth — the kind of milestones that are hard to reach while still guessing at profitability order by order.
Asked what he'd tell another founder in the same position, Anikanov points back to the habit rather than the software: know your numbers, check them every week, and let facts — not gut feeling — drive the next decision.
