How Benchling Brought Cross-Team Visibility & AI Innovation to their Close with Numeric

Henry Chinchen asked Claude about an allowance for doubtful accounts entry: a question he expected would pull info from NetSuite, the team’s ERP. Instead, Claude connected to Numeric via MCP.

"I said, ‘why did you connect to the Numeric one’? I was asking you about a NetSuite entry," Henry says. "It came back and said it thought Numeric had more context — it could see the reconciliations and any comments left on the checklist item when we prepared the allowance. So it felt it could give me a better answer going into Numeric than going directly into NetSuite."

He's used it that way since.

Henry leads technical accounting and financial reporting at Benchling, the AI platform for biotech R&D that helps scientists design molecules, manage lab workflows, and run experiments. For him and the rest of Benchling’s accounting org, Numeric started as a fix for a few familiar problems. It's since become part of their context layer for the close, and the groundwork for the kind of AI automation they had long desired.

A Close Running on Two Tracks

For several years, Benchling's accounting team had been running on a close management tool that only half the org actually used. Corporate accounting and AP were on the platform. Revenue, payroll, and tax had never adopted it, and weren't planning to.

"Other teams just grew to have an aversion to it," says Lutza Petrin, Corporate Accounting Manager. "It couldn't adjust to your needs, and that made them not want to adopt the tool at all."

The result was a dual-tracking problem. Corporate accounting ran their tasks in the close management tool while everyone else maintained separate trackers. A Google Sheet sat on top of it all, trying to stitch together a summarized view for the team's daily standup during the close. 

As renewal approached, the team set a non-negotiable: whatever they chose next, the entire accounting and finance org would commit to it. One tool, one team.

“We weren’t totally convinced on leaving,” says Priscilla McDermott, Head of Corporate Accounting. “We were demoing new features from our existing vendor too, wondering if they were really going to give us what we want, or is Numeric the better choice?”

Making a Shift, then Bracing for Impact

Numeric entered the picture through the Controller's professional network, where peers at other companies kept bringing it up. The team ran demos. They hosted a roundtable with companies already using Numeric alongside industry peers who were evaluating it. The feedback was strong.

For Lutza, the conviction came in the demo itself. "Immediately what stood out was seeing all these little thorns in our side just... handled.  I knew right away that our base needs would already be met, plus more."

After transitioning to Numeric, the team picked the hardest moment to prove things out: a quarter-end close – double the normal task volume. Lutza, who led the implementation, was preparing for the worst.

“I was so nervous about how that first month was going to go. And then …crickets. Everyone jumped in and it was fine. We were waiting for the shoe to drop the entire close, and it never did.”

She'd prepared for reconciliation issues, for people raising their hands about linking problems, for the friction that comes with any new system. It didn't happen. "I just felt super proud of the team and how they approached the implementation with an open mind. But then also the UI of the tool itself really supported everyone picking it up quickly."

Henry saw the same thing from the revenue team's side. "It seemed like everyone picked it up really intuitively.”

Achieving New Close Milestones

What had previously been a ceiling of 80% sign-offs in the prior close management tool — achieved months after a close, with extensive chasing — became timely, 100% sign-off every period. The team’s daily sync sharpened into a focused 15-minute conversation powered by Numeric's dashboards and filters.

The team has continued pushing further into the platform. Jenna Green, an Accounting Manager who'd taken over close management, started auto-reconciling certain workbooks so the team wouldn't have to touch them monthly. Another team member adopted Numeric's journal entry tagging feature, which auto-links journal entries to their corresponding tasks. Small wins compounded, and each one got shared across the team.

"Now that there's comfortability with Numeric, our team keeps being curious about what more they can do," Lutza says. "'Okay, I'm comfortable with this. Now, what's the next phase?'"

The Next Phase – the Numeric MCP

Then came the MCP and with it, a shift in how the team thinks about their work entirely.

Lutza's first reaction was skepticism. "At first. I thought, Numeric's a close management tool. How would I use the MCP for that?" Her first experiment was modest: using Claude to pull open review comments from Numeric and draft a Slack message nudging the team. It worked.

"And then I started asking, 'What else does the MCP have access to?'"

The real unlock was writing task-completion instructions in the form of Claude Skills directly into Numeric's description fields. When Claude reads a task through the MCP, it picks up those instructions and knows not just what to do, but how to do it the way Benchling's team expects. 

"If you just say 'write my flux explanations,' the way you write a flux for a revenue item versus operating expenses versus COGS is completely different. It's too specialized for a general prompt. So Numeric lets us group that context together cleanly  — what task, how, and when."

The governance angle matters just as much. "Everyone's going out and figuring out how to use AI and creating all these Python scripts and skills," Lutza says, "but I don't think a lot of people have gotten to a place of knowing where and how to save them so that the rest of the team is aware. Numeric is helping us have that clean attachment and transparency."

For example, Benchling’s Corporate accounting team maintains a rotational close system, where team members intentionally switch between various close workbooks periodically  to gain exposure to different areas of the close. Under this model, each person inherits not just tasks but the intelligence behind them as well. The skill lives in the description. The historical context lives in the comments. The supporting data lives in the linked reconciliations. None of it walks out the door with the previous owner.

Priscilla noticed the same pull. "Before, if I wanted to understand what happened with a GL account over six months, I'd go into NetSuite, then go back to each month's flux meeting files, and try to piece it all together," she says. "Now I just ask through the MCP and it gives me the answer, bringing together all the explanations we've provided over the past six months." 

A Partnership with Great Chemistry

When talking about Numeric, the thing Benchling's team keeps returning to, unprompted, is the relationship.

"I can tell that Numeric is an AI-native company the way you push out updates to the product," Lutza says. "If we ask for something, sometimes you have turnaround in a day or two. I feel like you would not be able to be running at this speed without AI. So it's been beautiful the way that AI is allowing you to help us, and then us to help ourselves."

Henry puts it in competitive terms. A colleague at another company recently told him, excitedly, that his close management vendor had just announced an AI feature for drafting flux analysis. "I went — oh, we've had that for a while," Henry says. The other vendor had apparently been promising the feature for eight months. 

When asked to describe Numeric in a few words, the answers come fast. Priscilla: "Intuitive, easy to use, and comprehensive." Lutza: "Malleable. Amazing." Henry pauses, then: "Modern. AI-native. Other tools are trying to patch AI in, but they weren’t actually built this way. Numeric was."

For years, Benchling’s tools lagged behind the team’s ambitions. Instead, Numeric is one of the first that’s meeting them in lockstep.