How Thoropass Avoided Accounting Growing Pains by Investing in Close Management

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When Jake Liebersohn joined Thoropass as the first Finance & Accounting hire, he inherited an accounting workflow that was relatively simple. That said, as the company began to rapidly expand — evidenced by the increasing headcount, sales, lines of business, and more — he realized quickly that the existing accounting structure wouldn’t suffice for the business’s increasing complexity.

In hopes of being ready for a fast-paced future, Jake set out to find a software that could ensure his team wouldn’t spend more time than necessary closing the books.

Bending but not breaking -- an accounting team approaches capacity

As a team of one, Jake took over a close process that was doable but not well documented. Working out of a single Excel workbook proved simple enough, but reconciliations and reporting were a bear to conduct. To boot, a series of looming changes were about to make his workload way more difficult. 

For one, Jake needed a way to keep up with the volume: Thoropass’s operations were quickly growing, accompanied by a need to account for not just new teams & expenses but also increasingly complex revenue recognition policies. 

Second, an impending financial audit called for new accounting practices and the need for more rigorous controls. 

Last, and perhaps most importantly, the existing structure was beginning to crack under the duress of cross-functional requests, making collaboration with key partners like the finance team slowly untenable.

Jake had started hearing about Numeric, a newer player in the close management space — he states, “When I talked to other finance and accounting leaders at similar stages, they all shared that the current month-end close products were for large organizations and they were cumbersome to implement and maintain. The only name I heard for a product that would provide us the simplicity and real efficiency we were looking for was Numeric.”

Numeric's speed and ease of use proves perfect for Thoropass

Jake heard that implementing Numeric was fast – his own onboarding went even faster than he’d anticipated. 

Within the first (and only) onboarding call, Thoropass integrated their entire accounting system and witnessed how any update to the trial balance would reflect system-wide to ensure accounts were properly tied out. 

Post-onboarding, Jake still found the platform to be easy to use: “…you don’t need to commit to doing everything for the first close on the product. You can also be iterative in your process and expand into more of the product as the months go on to build out your more complex workflows.”

Over time, Thoropass has been able to scale their Numeric processes in lockstep with their expanding business — in turn, this has given Jake full confidence that his team is well-positioned to support the company’s continued growth.

Beyond that, they’ve been impressed with their ongoing relationship with Numeric’s support teams; whenever issues arise, a quick Slack message to Numeric yields improvements and changes in short order. 

A complex close that's completely under control

Thoropass’ results speak for themselves — since adopting Numeric, they’ve reduced their month-end close by three days in the same time frame that their revenue increased by 4.5X. 

They credit Numeric with making it super easy to identify bottlenecks — with features like dependencies and task delegation, team members can clearly understand their role in the close while also seeing the bigger picture. Beyond that, onboarding new members has become a breeze as upon opening Numeric, they can easily see what was submitted in the months prior to their arrival.

Jake recognizes that he and his team find “clear time savings every month with Numeric.” As he described in more detail, “The little things really add up into a big impact. From not needing to manually export information into our files and being able to see immediately when balances unexpectedly change, to having quick access to trends and details in our variance analysis means we cut out so much time in these processes.”

Lastly, Jake feels like his company is ready for whatever their auditors throw at them, giving him greater peace of mind. “I’m very much looking forward to the fact that our auditors are going to ask us for support for interim testing, and I can say ‘just go to my September work in Numeric and they will be guided to exactly where they need to go and it will spit out the answers for all of the questions they are asking.”

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Want to build a better close process before your business expands? Schedule a conversation with our team here. 

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