Rose Gold partners with venues in New York to throw weekly parties every weekend. On the holidays it runs full venue buyouts and events in markets across the country. Samantha, its finance manager, handles the money for Rose Gold and all of its sub-brands.
Before Cleo
Rose Gold paid hundreds, and some months thousands, of contractors through QuickBooks and its bank. Samantha typed in every contractor's W-9 and bank details by hand, then entered and sent each payment.
"It was something that was super time consuming and took up most of my week," she said. There was also a lot of back and forth with contractors about how to do their invoices.
She looked at other tools. They all required inviting each contractor one at a time. "That might make sense if you have 20 to 50 contractors. But when you're trying to onboard hundreds of people a week, it's that extra step of having to invite everyone."
The switch
Rose Gold opened its Cleo account on July 24, 2025. Samantha exported the contractors it already had in QuickBooks to a CSV, uploaded it to Cleo and invited everyone in one shot. Their accounts were ready before the holidays.
That mattered by Halloween. Rose Gold ran over 30 events with, in Samantha's estimate, 600 to 1,000 contractors across the country. In November 2025, 341 bills came in. Its busiest month so far is July 2026, with 355.
What runs on Cleo now
New contractors get one link and set themselves up: bank account, W-9 and all. 2,447 of the 2,613 bills Rose Gold has paid were sent in by the contractor, not typed by Samantha. The median bill is paid 5.6 days after it comes in.
DJs and promoters enter their hours or their ticket revenue, and Cleo calculates their pay from Rose Gold's commission structure. Samantha's favorite feature: she can fix a mistake on an invoice herself and leave a note saying why, instead of sending it back to the contractor.
It literally changed my life. It's freed up so much time in my week. I'm saving like 12 to 15 hours a week just on paying invoices.