How Kapten & Son empowers lean finance

Founded in 2014, Kapten & Son has grown from a student side hustle into one of Germany’s most recognisable lifestyle brands. With its roots in D2C and a fast-growing wholesale and B2B arm, the company now sells backpacks, watches, sunglasses and apparel in over 30 countries.

As the business expanded, so did the complexity of its finance operations. With a small team managing accounting and controlling across multiple entities and revenue streams, Kapten & Son needed a solution that would bring structure to its spend processes—without adding headcount.

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The Challenge

Kapten & Son’s finance department is intentionally lean—three people in accounting, three in controlling, one head of finance, and an external tax advisor. While agile and effective, the team had to get by with an increasingly fragmented toolstack using DATEV, LucaNet, Candis, Agicap and others.

Manual handoffs between tools, inconsistent workflows and unclear approval paths left Kapten & Son with inefficiencies that were difficult to scale.

But the biggest bottleneck was credit cards. With just a handful in use across teams, tracking down receipts and assigning costs created unnecessary back-and-forth. Invoice management was handled through Candis because of highly complex approval workflows. 

But for the long-run the aim was to have a single solution to manage credit cards, invoices, and travel expenses. Thanks to the continued development of the invoicing tool, we are now able to implement complex and customised approval workflows tailored to our specific needs.

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The Solution

First and foremost Kapten & Son introduced Moss to tackle their credit card and travel expense chaos. With dedicated virtual and physical cards for every user, clear cost centre assignment, and automated receipt matching, Moss made it easier for employees to manage their own spend—and easier for finance to trust the data.

Intuitive UI and strong OCR capabilities allowed finance to focus more on analysis and less on chasing people.

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By saving time, Kapten & Son are able to seamlessly integrate Moss data into their accounting and shift resources toward more strategic initiatives.

The Results

Four years on and there has been a major cultural shift within the company. Finance has now become an enabler not a bottleneck. Employees from all different departments can now manage their own expenses, with minimal intervention from the finance team.

Optimised processes encourage greater accountability across teams. Employees are empowered to manage their expenses within set budgets—strengthening trust and autonomy at Kapten & Son.

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On the finance team’s end, Moss has brought about huge time savings by automating low-value tasks. The internal workload has been reduced to primarily reviewing and controlling, rather than data entry and matching.

Moss has become a key component of Kapten & Son’s scalable finance setup—allowing the company to handle increasing complexity without growing the team.