Why A Centralized Close & Better Balance Sheet Recs Spelled Success for Soundstripe

Soundstripe aims to make music sharing as simple as it should be. They offer musicians a place to host their music which in turn becomes an extensive royalty-free library of sounds for customers to use – all done in an effort to take the headache out of traditional musical licensing.

As Soundstripe’s operations started to scale, Director of Finance Michael Oleis began evaluating his team’s processes to make sure they could keep up with the tempo. One quick look at the company’s current month-end close and it was clear that things were out of tune.

To turn things around without changing headcount, Michael knew he needed to help his team consolidate information and move with greater velocity. He started looking for tools that could give his lean team some more leverage.

Stuck in the mix -- the search for a simple SaaS solution

Before Numeric, Soundstripe – like many accounting teams – was accustomed to a very manual and time-intensive workflow. It was hard to keep track of everything that was living in Excel files, Word docs, Asana boards, and more. Even worse, certain tasks took forever: Michael often found himself having to manually reconcile 100+ balance sheet accounts each month – a recurring thorn in his side. 

So how could things improve? To start, Michael wanted something comprehensive that could store accounting data, represent team workflows, and ultimately do away with the team’s current legion of software. Next, he hoped to automate balance sheet reconciliations and give himself more time to focus on strategic analysis for the business.

Numeric impresses with intuitive experience & instant impact

After an initial Numeric demo, Michael deemed the platform to be uniquely swift – other products claimed to deliver big time savings but Numeric’s intuitive design and integrated workflows seemed actually capable of doing so. 

In all, he felt that Numeric gave him the best of both worlds: a complete product with not only a powerful month-end close solution but also a smooth, well-designed user interface.

Michael was eager to see immediate results: “We wanted software that could get started quickly with our current close and allow for the team to easily scale into more robust processes.” After deciding to sign on with Numeric, his wishes were realized – from the very start, Numeric helped the team to move faster. He describes, —

"Onboarding was quick, painless. The month we made the decision, we plugged it in and were able to use it in our close that month…it wasn’t this multi-week rollout.”

Soon after, Michael began to see the immediate impact he desired. Meetings were on the decline, thanks to the collaboration happening through Numeric’s native comments & mentions. Above all, he thinks that the real game-changer has frankly been the ability to have his entire workflow live within a single, unified platform.

“To be able to have one source of truth on where we stand is extremely important to me. If it’s not checked off there, it’s not done.”

A harmonious close process for teams and collaborators

Numeric functions like the centralized playbook Soundstripe always felt they needed. 

With a highly structured month-end close checklist, team members can come in, see their specific actions – or plays – and carry them out. New users respond well to the platform’s intuitiveness while existing members appreciate the improved documentation and ease of communication. Someone goes on PTO? Not a problem – tasks are easily transferred across the team where someone can pick up a task right where another left off. 

Ultimately, Michael is thrilled by the amount of time they are able to save with Numeric. Reconciliations, his old nemesis, have now been streamlined thanks to balance sheet automation. With a live integrated general ledger, connected schedules, and automatic alerts for changes in the balance, Michael knows in real-time whether or not balance sheet accounts will tie out. 

As a small team who adopted Numeric early on to help streamline the close, Soundstripe can’t imagine going back. And as Michael thinks about the future of his work at Soundstripe, he is more confident than ever that the newfound efficiency of his month-end close will continue to pay massive dividends for the rest of the team.

“[Numeric] helps tremendously. The month-end close helps us be transparent with key stakeholders, whether internal or external – getting them accurate information in a very efficient manner is extremely important throughout the year. And then at year-end, being able to show any sort of compliance – auditors, bankers – that you have these controls in place and that your numbers are reliable. It’s incredible.”

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If you’d like to learn more about how Numeric can supercharge your month-end close, request a demo today. 

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