With a mission to re-industrialize America, Hadrian hopes to create the planet’s most efficient factories: ones that transform operations for companies across the Defense & Space sectors. In placing a bet on the future of manufacturing, Hadrian believes they are, by extension, making an investment in the universal well-being of humanity.
Today — while we’re months, years, and maybe even lightyears away from some of those realities — Controller Max Carpenter is working to give Hadrian a strong, financial foundation. Brought in as the company’s first accounting hire in Feb. ‘24, his mandate was simple: transform Hadrian’s financial processes from cash-basis to full GAAP accounting, complete a Big 4 audit, and cut close time from 15 days to under 7. The timeline? Do it all within a year.
Feeling that his work on the latter would give him leverage for everything else, Carpenter set on a path to make things happen.
When Max stepped into the Controller seat, Hadrian was smack in the middle of a NetSuite implementation that took his full attention. However, once the dust settled, he realized that he was still going to have to build most of the accounting function from ground zero. In his words,
“We had no reconciliations on any of our accounts and almost no accruals. We really didn’t even have a complete checklist, just an Airtable where we somewhat kept track of things. We had some outsourced accountants, but no one had true GAAP experience in creating new processes from scratch and then getting people to buy into those processes.”
In Carpenter’s eyes, the value of a finance team stems from their ability to create predictions & inform future decision-making for a business, not in manually tracking past data. Ready to free himself from that kind of time-intensive work and backed by a CFO who saw the need in investing heavily in automating the accounting function, Max started surveying the field for solutions.
It only took thirty minutes to convince Carpenter that Numeric was the right choice.
In classic accountant fashion, he first sought advice from his accounting networks to see what solutions people would recommend. One peer mentioned that Numeric was an impressive up-and-comer in the space worth checking out, so Carpenter booked a demo. By the midpoint of the conversation, Max had been converted: compared to another close product he’d toured weeks prior, Carpenter saw immediate value in two key areas that he felt no competitor offered:
He states:
“I was surprised to see how much detail diving you could do in Numeric — the fact that you could surface all your journal entries and the trends in each account way faster than you could in NetSuite was really impressive. I could already tell that it was going to save me tons of time each month.”
Within a month of signing the order form, the Hadrian team was up and using Numeric. Then, as months started to pass and time began to stack up, Numeric’s ROI started to become undeniable.
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Within the first month of joining Numeric, Hadrian shaved five days from their close. Then, with each successive month, the team was able to shave another day per close cycle. Over a year’s span, Carpenter’s team took their unwieldy 15 day close all the way down to five days — mostly attributable to Numeric.
In the same time, they have achieved these equally remarkable results:
In the same amount of time, Hadrian’s revenues have multiplied, their business complexity has increased, and thanks to Numeric and the other tools in their accounting tech stack, the team hasn’t had to add a single new team member.
So, where else does Max feel that Numeric has upleveled his team’s work?
Within the first hour of seeing Numeric in action, Hadrian’s CFO saw clear value add. As Max describes, “he commented that (Numeric) was one of the better things he had ever seen as a CFO — just having the ability to see all of that transaction detail and those month-over-month trend analyses laid out in front of him was huge.”
In turn, the CFO is now able to have more intelligent conversations with the rest of the leadership team and answer questions about revenue, etc. with ease.
Carpenter credits Numeric’s AI flux writer with reducing the time needed for writing out flux analyses by account from 2-3 days to only half a day, an 80% reduction.
That benefit is heightened by his disappointment with other tools in the market: “Most tools that claim to have AI are just wrappers of ChatGPT and Claude, they don’t actually do much. Numeric’s is one of the only ones I’ve found to provide value.”
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When asked to describe Numeric in a few words, Carpenter calls it a “time-unlocking agent” that allows him to focus on areas where he feels his team can drive forward company impact.
Beyond that, the team feels also less bogged down in daily tasks — Max notes that there are very few days where the team must work extended hours, a credit to organizing their close better via the Numeric checklist.
Auditors reviewing Hadrian's processes were impressed with their accounting maturity. "They already commented during their interim testing that we were miles ahead of most other companies our size when it comes to accounting processes," Carpenter notes.
The systematic approvals and review processes in Numeric provided strong evidence of controls and proper oversight, potentially reducing audit risk and complexity.
Early-stage, high-growth companies generate momentum by taking calculated risks at critical junctures. In Hadrian’s case, selecting the right close platform has made the difference between giving their accounting team velocity and being mired in a chaotic mix of outsourced accountants, disconnected systems, and unbuilt processes.
As his team expands later this year and new challenges come into view, Max Carpenter retains confidence that Numeric will be the tool to guide his team forward. He sees the two companies as linked behind a similar vision — one in which accounting’s tedious past doesn’t hinder its brighter, data-driven, and ultimately, more strategic future.
AI-assisted. Operationally efficient. Audit ready.
