Summer Club NYC runs a summer season in New York. Its payouts are commissions on tickets, tables and bottles sold, plus hourly shifts and set times. Every one of them depends on someone checking the numbers first.
Before Cleo
Matt Newman walked through the old process step by step. Invoices arrived by email. The accountant deciphered each one and entered it into a Google Sheet. From the sheet, someone generated the payment. Then they marked it paid in QuickBooks.
Every payee had their own version of an invoice, so a lot of the accountant's time went to figuring out whose bill was whose.
The switch
Summer Club opened its Cleo account on May 28, 2025, right before its season. In July 2025 it received 175 bills. The volume follows the season: 131 bills came in that September, then between 3 and 20 a month over the winter, then 71 in June 2026 when the season started again.
What runs on Cleo now
Bills come into Cleo, where an admin on the team checks each commission against the sales in Toast. Once she approves it, Matt approves it and the payment goes out. If a bill is missing something, they decline it with a note that says what to include, and the payee sends it back.
Matt follows it all from the Cleo dashboard: what was paid this week, what is going out, what is still waiting and what is overdue.
Most venues are taking like 30, 60 days to get people paid, and we're turning around paying it in a week or two.
Matt says the accountant is "saving hours a week for sure." He pays her for the same hours as before. What changed is how she spends them: "instead of figuring out whose invoice it is, she's actually able to run numbers and reports for me."