Mark43 CFO Chris Merwin on Building Finance Infrastructure for Public Safety Tech

The public safety software sector has quietly become one of the more complex corners of enterprise SaaS—police departments don't exactly operate like your typical B2B customer, and the sales cycles make enterprise software look breezy by comparison. Chris Merwin, CFO of Mark43, has spent the past several years figuring out how to build finance operations for a company selling cloud-based records management systems to law enforcement agencies, and the challenges are... let's say unique.

Mark43, for those unfamiliar, provides cloud-based software for police departments—think records management, computer-aided dispatch, and analytics tools. It's the kind of infrastructure that sounds straightforward until you remember that police departments are government entities with procurement processes that make corporate purchasing look like Amazon one-click ordering. Merwin's job involves navigating budget cycles that don't align with fiscal years, compliance requirements that stack on top of each other like regulatory Jenga, and customers whose buying decisions involve city councils, public hearings, and occasionally ballot measures.

The company operates in what Merwin describes as the "public safety" space, which is a polite way of saying "we sell to organizations that have very specific ideas about data security, very long implementation timelines, and budgets that depend on tax revenue and municipal bonds." For a CFO, this means rethinking basically everything about how SaaS finance typically works. The revenue recognition alone must be fascinating—government contracts often involve multi-year commitments with payment structures that would make a typical SaaS finance team weep.

What makes Merwin's role particularly interesting is the timing. Mark43 is operating in a sector that's simultaneously under intense public scrutiny (police reform debates) and desperate for modernization (many departments still run on systems that predate the iPhone). That creates a strange dynamic: strong fundamental demand for better technology, but a customer base navigating political headwinds that can derail deals at the eleventh hour. Try modeling that revenue forecast.

The broader context here is that public sector software has become one of the more intriguing finance challenges in tech. These aren't companies that can just throw venture capital at growth and figure out unit economics later. Government customers demand profitability, stability, and the ability to support systems for decades—not exactly the "move fast and break things" playbook. For finance leaders like Merwin, that means building organizations that look more like traditional enterprise software companies than the typical SaaS startup, even if the underlying technology is cutting-edge.

The question for CFOs watching this space: how do you build financial infrastructure for companies serving customers who operate on completely different timelines, budget cycles, and decision-making processes than private sector buyers? Merwin's experience suggests it requires rethinking everything from cash flow management to headcount planning to how you think about customer acquisition costs when a single deal might take two years to close and involve public comment periods.

It's the kind of problem that doesn't get solved with a better FP&A dashboard. It requires actually understanding how your customers' finance operations work—which, in the case of municipal governments, is its own special adventure.