Small Cricut Accounting Team Sets Up Big IPO Success With FloQast

When Cricut, a Utah-based maker of consumer crafting machines and supplies, decided to go public during the pandemic, its small accounting team was ready for the challenge, exemplifying the company mantra of “Small teams can do great things.” Using FloQast Close and Flux Analysis, the Cricut team was able to quickly organize and meet all pre-IPO audit and reporting standards. In their post-IPO journey, Cricut has since centralized SEC and SOX filings through FloQast Compliance Management and has taken total Close days from 12 down to 8.

Consumer crafting and DIY-enabler Cricut (CRCT) helps people lead more creative lives by providing tools to make their do-it-yourself projects beautiful, fun, and easy.

With $886 million in revenue in 2022 and 8.4 million users worldwide, the company is on a mission to transform how people think about crafting, designing, and making.

Since joining the company in 2017, Ryan Harmer, Vice President of Accounting and Corporate Controller at Cricut, has been on a complementary yet decidedly different mission to transform how the company reconciles, audits, and reports its month-end Close. All of which became exponentially more demanding leading up to – and following – Cricut’s IPO in 2021. Hard work and long days were the standard early on, but Harmer knew things had to change.

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Our close was very manual and stressful, with 60 to 70 steps tracked in Excel spreadsheets, and we didn’t have a lot of precision and rigor around the process, or any ways to track which reconciliations were done or weren’t done. We were ready for a real change and evolution, and that’s when we brought in FloQast.” ‍

– Ryan Harmer, VP, Accounting and Corporate Controller

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Empowering Creativity – And a Better Month-End Close

To keep up with Cricut’s growth and increase oversight and capabilities, Harmer brought in Scott Christensen as Senior Director of Accounting.

“We knew we needed to automate as much as possible, get out of Excel, and gain a more holistic view of what’s going on,” Christensen said. “We found FloQast and liked not only the product but also the culture and mentality of being scrappy and innovative like us.”

Reconciliations and checklists were immediately set up to be monitored and managed in FloQast.

“The FloQast team helped us get our checklists into the tool and connect SAP S/4HANA, so our account balances would sync every hour,” Christensen said. “Now we know exactly what’s going on, what’s been reconciled, and what we need to prioritize.”

Christensen and his accounting colleagues huddle daily during the eight days of the month-end Close. Daily meetings keep everyone aware of progress and results by reviewing dashboards within FloQast. Total days-to-Close have gone from 12 down to 8, and final reviews are no longer a late-night scramble.  

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We used to go up to midnight on our last day of the close, checking and rechecking entries and final reviews, but now everything is signed off by 3 or 4 in the afternoon which is a big win for our team."

– Scott Christensen, Sr. Director, Accounting

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From Idea to S-1 IPO Filing – In Just 8 Months  

In March 2020, with revenues and demand rising rapidly, the decision was made to go public, and company leaders set a goal of having the S-1 filing ready by November 2020. Cricut successfully went public on Nasdaq in March 2021.

Shortly after the public offering, Bryan Kant joined the team as Director of Internal Audit.

“We had a pretty good setup from a control standpoint thanks to FloQast,” Kant said. “It was good to see we had the SAP reconciliation tie-in, but I was really happy to have FloQast Flux Analysis as a compensating control and that we could always point to that to get ahead of any kind of material issue.”

All internal controls are managed in the FloQast Compliance Management module, and corresponding checklists facilitate easy documentation uploads for quick evidence retrieval by both internal and external auditors.

The module was added to make post-IPO compliance reporting more efficient and less costly. All SEC and SOX reporting steps are tracked in FloQast, and the integration with Workiva supports SEC report creation and filing.

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The FloQast Compliance Management tool allows us to link our work steps and manage our RCM (Risk Control Matrix) all within FloQast. It’s made my life easier, and life a lot easier for our auditors, which means fewer billable hours in the long term.”

‍–  Bryan Kant, Director, Internal Audit

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Christensen is both pragmatic and positive about his recommendation of FloQast.

“There’s no reason to keep struggling with Excel for task management and workflow,” Christensen said. “If you want to automate your accounting Close and everything that goes with it, FloQast is a fantastic tool.”