About
Built by people who've been solving this problem for 25 years.
WANDA is a product of Kontrolla — a UK software company founded in 2001 by Cliff Smith and Paul Collins.
For a quarter of a century, they have been building purchasing and document management software for organisations that need to keep complex financial processes under control.
The Story
Cliff and Paul have spent their careers at the intersection of technology and operational finance. They've seen first hand what happens when purchasing processes aren't properly controlled — the lost purchase orders, the unauthorised spend, the compliance failures that only surface when auditors ask awkward questions.
WANDA is the product of everything they've learned. It's not built in the abstract — it's built on two and a half decades of working directly with Finance Management, understanding the real friction in purchasing workflows, and designing systems that actually fix the problem.
That experience is still what drives development today. When you contact WANDA, you're talking to the people who built it. That's not something many software companies can say.
The Team
Experience on which WANDA is based
Paul Collins
Co-founder
First-class honours degree in Computing. Paul leads WANDA's product design and architecture. He built the system from the ground up using the latest Microsoft and Telerik development tools, and continues to develop it hands-on — which means the product improves based on real customer experience, not a product roadmap written in a boardroom.
Cliff Smith
Co-founder
Background in Civil Engineering, CAD development, and document management. Cliff co-founded Kontrolla in 2001 and has led client relationships and sales ever since.
Cliff knows the problems WANDA solves because he's spent 25 years listening to senior Finance professionals describe them.
WHY WANDA?
Why call it WANDA?
The name is an acronym — but not an obvious one.
WA&DA stands for Workflow Automation & Document Approvals.
The two halves describe exactly what the product does: it assists with the workflow around purchasing, and it manages the approval of documents — purchase orders and invoices — that flow through that process.
The ampersand in the middle is the point. Wanda isn't just a workflow tool, and it isn't just a document system. It's the connection between the two — and between the people, teams, and finance systems that need to work together for purchasing to run properly. The & sits at the heart of the name because it sits at the heart of what Wanda does.
The logo makes that visible. The ampersand (&) is shaped to read as the letter N — so the name reads as both WA&DA and WANDA simultaneously. It's a small piece of craft that reflects how Wanda approaches everything: the detail matters, and things should work together.
