Customer Stories
Instacart Establishes New Standard of Accounting Excellence With FloQast
Sherry Wong doesn’t miss the days she would have to upload a trial balance every hour manually.
Depending on demand, the accounting manager at Instacart found herself having to do so more frequently, sometimes every 30 minutes, followed by painstakingly going through the spreadsheets and linking everything.
“It was really frustrating and time-consuming,” she admitted.
Still, Instacart’s Month-End Close process worked. Technically. But everyone knew there was room for improvement.
“We also had limitations in managing the Google Sheets,” added Sherry, who joined the company in 2017. “We did lock the Google Sheets, but sometimes, dates or sign-offs would get updated. Of course, you can check the version history to verify, but we lacked the controls to do that sustainably. Add in audit trail and review notes, and we knew we needed something new.”
But as the company took off, it became apparent that the accounting department would need something to help it scale to meet the exploding expectations. Rachael Peeters, Senior Manager, GL Accounting & Reporting at Instacart, and her team got the green light to explore new tools to improve team efficiency.
“Having used FloQast at a previous company, I knew it would be a simple implementation and wouldn’t take several months,” she said. “We ultimately selected FloQast for its ease of use, intuitive user interface, and ability to get up and running quickly. We also didn’t want to change our process drastically, and we needed that interconnectivity with our current ERP vendor, so FloQast became the obvious choice.”
Not long after completing a quick implementation, the problem of having to manually upload new TBs dissipated. “The implementation team was so responsive and I really felt like it was tailored to fit our needs specifically, not a ‘one size fits all,’ situation,” said Sherry.
“Look, I love FloQast’s checklist module, but when I learned about FloQast Connect, that was what I was really looking forward to,” Sherry said. “The formatting, adding new items, and formulas were really dragging on me, and because it was just in a spreadsheet, there was always the chance that someone could inadvertently change the original data. In FloQast, you can’t sign off if there’s a difference, so we were able to ensure that everything matched in the end.”
To learn more about how FloQast helped support Instacart’s accounting team as it scaled with the company and helped establish a standard of excellence still in place today, check out the full customer story.
