How Orca Consolidated a Multi-Entity Finance Stack Into One Operating Account

“We’re pretty much touching every rail Altitude has to offer. We’re fully bought into the entire suite.”

Kate, Controller, Orca

For Orca, month-end close used to mean logging into multiple bank accounts, card platforms, vaults, and payment tools, pulling statements from each, and piecing everything together in QuickBooks. Today, most of that work happens in one global account on Altitude.

Orca is a leading liquidity layer on Solana, with a team of roughly 25 across Europe, the US, and Asia. Kate, Orca’s controller, manages the finance function with a team of around three, the COO, and an external accountant whom Orca plans to bring in-house. Together, they support a protocol that might send money to 10 countries one month and 20 the next. As Kate puts it, there’s no such thing as a normal month in crypto. The challenge wasn’t any single payment. It was keeping track of everything around it.

A multi-entity company creates a reconciliation problem

Orca operates across multiple entities and jurisdictions. Vendor contracts sit under different entities, while card platforms have their own jurisdictional restrictions. Revenue arrives onchain in stablecoins, but expenses such as AWS, GitHub, compliance, and legal counsel still need to be paid in fiat. A fully remote team adds travel, conferences, and offsites to the mix.

A vendor’s contract and a card platform’s restrictions could determine which entity paid for an expense. At month-end, finance had to collect statements from each platform and reconcile the spend across the company.

The same fragmentation ran through the rest of Orca’s finances: bank accounts for different entities and jurisdictions, backup accounts in case access changed, separate vaults for treasury and operating funds, and additional tools to move between stablecoins, fiat, and foreign currencies. Each tool handled a specific need. Together, they made it harder to see and reconcile the whole picture.

The month-end nightmare

Kate calls the old month-end close a logistical nightmare. Her team logged into each platform, downloaded statements, uploaded them to QuickBooks, and checked that every transaction was recorded under the right entity. With accounts, cards, vaults, and payments spread across separate tools, closing the books meant piecing together a complete picture every month.

It started with cards

Orca first came to Altitude for cards. Most of its spending already ran through cards, and its previous provider had encountered restrictions on stablecoin card use in Europe. As a longtime Squads user, Orca began exploring whether Altitude could solve that immediate need.

It did. As Kate’s team grew more confident in the product and the people behind it, Orca moved operating funds into Altitude, followed by treasury. The team also began routing invoices into the account for payment.

“A lot of trust goes into giving your money to someone else. One of the best indicators is how well a team manages the relationship. They’re open to feedback, they act on it fast, and they respond almost immediately.”

Kate, Controller, Orca

What started as a card solution became the account Orca uses for much of its financial operation.

One account instead of a stack

Today, Orca uses Altitude for ACH, wire, and SWIFT payments, cards, treasury, invoices, and bill pay. Transactions also sync to QuickBooks. Bringing those workflows together has removed steps from the finance team’s day. For routine operations, Orca no longer needs a separate platform to move between stablecoins and fiat, and the funds it uses to pay and spend are visible alongside the payments themselves.

The QuickBooks integration has made a particular difference at month-end. Early on, Orca’s finance team exported statements from Altitude and uploaded them manually. The team pushed for a direct connection. Now they can sync transactions, categorize them in Altitude, and send them to QuickBooks without repeating the work there.

Consolidation with clear separation

Orca is deliberate about how its accounts are structured on Altitude. Funds are separated by function, treasury stays distinct from operating funds, and different accounts carry their own permissions and approvals. The team avoids mingling funds wherever possible, because clean separation makes accounting across several entities easier and makes anomalies easier to spot. When each account has a clear purpose, activity outside the norm stands out immediately. That structure gives Orca the benefit of consolidation without giving up the controls a multi-entity finance team needs.

A conservative approach to earning

Earning on balances was part of Orca’s decision to use Altitude, but Kate’s team weighs returns against counterparty risk. After seeing failures and hacks across the market, they are deliberate about where funds sit and how much exposure they have in any one place. Kate sees her team as stewards of the company’s money. Earning on idle balances within the operating account gives them another option as they balance return, access, and risk.

Making onchain revenue usable when it matters

After the interview, Kate returned to one issue in particular: the time it takes to turn stablecoins into fiat the business can use. On some platforms, that takes two or three business days. A delay like that becomes urgent when payroll is due, contractors need to be paid, or a critical vendor needs funds by tomorrow.

For Orca, faster access to funds means the team can respond to payment needs without holding more fiat than it expects to use. Cards remove another step by letting the company spend without first moving funds through a separate off-ramp. Kate sees that connection between onchain revenue and everyday payments as central to running a crypto-native business. The easier it is to use the money Orca earns, the easier it is to keep the business moving.

What Orca would tell another protocol

Kate’s advice to another protocol is to get the payment basics in place early. If revenue arrives onchain, the team needs a reliable way to use it for vendors, payroll, cards, and other expenses, with accounting that can keep up. More complex treasury arrangements can follow as the organization grows.

Orca took that path one step at a time. It came to Altitude for cards, then added operating funds, treasury, invoices, and payments. Work that once ran across separate platforms now happens largely in the account the team uses every day. At month-end, Kate’s team has fewer statements to gather and fewer transactions to piece together in QuickBooks.