GetYourGuide Automates Reconciliations and Reduces Month-End Close by Over 50% with FloQast

Berlin-based GetYourGuide, the world’s leading platform to discover and book travel experiences, used to struggle through its month-end Close – for 16 international entities – with a collection of disjointed spreadsheets, checklists, and manual reconciliations until it found FloQast. Now, GetYourGuide’s accounting team gets real-time status views into critical Close tasks, knows exactly who’s working on them, and lowered total reconciliation and Close time from 20 days to 7 days.Since 2009, GetYourGuide has become the world’s go-to source for more than 180,000+ experiences such as guided food tours, immersive experiences and other things to do worldwide. The rapidly growing company has connected travelers from nearly every country on Earth with over 120 million experiences, from guided tours by local experts to culinary excursions, cooking and craft classes, skip-the-line tickets for iconic monuments and museums, and more.

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FloQast was 100% more user-friendly than anything else we looked at. And we thought it would be easier for new users to learn and use right away.”‍

– Rebecca Stuart, Group Financial Controller

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From Sydney, to Paris, to Dubai, GetYourGuide’s 17 offices and ~800 employees are focused on delivering unforgettable experiences for its global travelers, while working with its thousands of experience creators to grow their businesses.What hasn’t always been so incredible is its month-end Close process. Rebecca Stuart is Group Financial Controller at GetYourGuide and has overall responsibility for the monthly Close.“We were using checklists, doing trial balances manually, and our team of 1-5 had little to no visibility into what was finished or not finished,” Rebecca said. “We made it work, but we knew we couldn’t scale and handle new growth effectively, it just wasn’t sustainable.”

Stepping Up to Scale, Speed, and Quality

The GetYourGuide Accounting team liked FloQast immediately for its simplicity and intuitive design. A pending ERP conversion to SAP S/4HANA Cloud also played a role in the decision, but it didn’t delay GetYourGuide’s plans to move forward with FloQast. “Even though we were changing ERP’s we didn’t hesitate to implement FloQast for the immediate transparency and productivity,” Rebecca said. “We made the switch to SAP after two years of using FloQast with our legacy ERP, and that transition was painless, it felt like all we had to do was copy, paste, and share; it was very straightforward.”Two other key players on the GetYourGuide Accounting team are power users of FloQast, too. Carolina Rodrigues is responsible for closing GetYourGuide’s German business entities each month, while Victor Dominguez handles all international entities. “It only took one short online training session for our users to get it and start using it,” Carolina said. “And if there are any questions afterward, the FloQast support and success teams are amazing.”

Transparency and a 10-Day Reconciliation and Close – All In One Platform

Rebecca said the FloQast platform has made it easier to keep pace with company growth and collaborate across teams. The most tangible metric of success has been shortening the days to reconcile and Close.“We’re now able to reconcile 600 accounts and Close in just 7 days, a process that used to take us 20 days on average,” Rebecca said. “And we feel we can reduce it by another 1-2 days as we continue to gain more efficiencies.”Carolina said fewer interruptions and sidebar conversations, thanks to FloQast dashboards, notes, and Gmail integration, allow the team to focus and get more done in a shorter amount of time.

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We’ve cut down on a lot of the back-and-forth emails, Slack messages, and desk conversations that we used to have for questions and status updates,” Carolina said. “Now we have a global view of the workload and an audit trail for all of it.”

‍– Carolina Rodrigues, Head of Platform Accounting

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Victor recently received a reference call from another company looking to purchase FloQast. He summed up the FloQast benefits this way.

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You can make close decisions in real time, everything’s tracked, and you help your team solve problems and keep things moving, which is really the main role of any good leader,” Victor said. “It’s easier, faster, and everybody wins.”

‍– Victor Dominguez, International Accounting Manager

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