How Huel's Finance Team Took Back Control of Month-End

Month-End on a Shoestring

Huel’s finance team had the right people. What they didn’t have was the right system.

Month-end ran on a patchwork of Excel colour-coding, notebook scribbles, Slack messages, and memory. Nobody knew precisely where things stood, who was doing what, or when a task was actually finished. Kushal Malde, Head of Financial Control, puts it bluntly: the process was “scrappy.” He’d have to go around asking each person individually whether their tasks were done. Not because he wanted to micromanage, but because there was no other way to find out.

Sophie Scott, Financial Reporting Manager, felt it from the other side. She’d finish a task on day two, only to find it thrown out of reconciliation by day six because of someone else’s journal entry – and nobody had told her. She was tracking her own progress in a notebook and an Excel sheet, colour-coding whether or not she’d finished things. “I’d get to the end of the day and think I’ve done one task,” she said. “And I’d done the same task four or five times.”

The result was close to exhaustion. Sophie jokes that in her weekly WhatsApp group, every update said the same thing: “doing month-end.” Kushal would often spend evenings running balance sheets through the ERP system, which could often take a few hours just to ensure balances reconciled. There was no time for analysis, and no time for process improvement.

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“There’s a never-ending cycle. When you have extended month-ends, you have no time outside the month-end to improve things.”

– Kushal Malde, Head of Financial Control

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Finding the Right Fit with FloQast

When the team hit a tipping point, Kushal and Huel’s Finance Director agreed they needed a dedicated month-end solution. A robust platform built for purpose, not another makeshift workaround. They looked at what was available and reached out to FloQast. Kushal said the demo clicked immediately: “We loved the tool straight away.”

The team didn’t want a quick fix. They wanted something that would hold up as the company continued to grow. Dion Boyle, Manager at PwC UK, who led the implementation, picked up on this immediately: “Huel didn’t want a system that helped them for a couple of years. They wanted something that would help them for five, ten years down the line.”

Working with PwC UK, the onboarding moved fast. The team originally planned an April go-live, but they were fully operational by March, meaning the total implementation time took less than two months. Kushal, who’d been through enough software onboardings to be sceptical, was surprised: “I’ve had experiences where the demo is great and then onboarding falls short, but on this occasion it was just so seamless.”

Closing the Gap

Balance sheets that once took ten minutes per entity now take 30 seconds. Review time dropped by three to four hours each month – saving close to a full week over the course of a year. The team estimates they’ve cut one to two days off the overall month-end close alone.

But the time savings are secondary to how the team works together now. Before FloQast, the team simply didn't have time to dig into the 'why' behind the numbers before Kushal came to review. So questions inevitably stacked up at the end of the process. Now, she leaves her analysis as a comment in FloQast before he even starts reviewing. Notifications replaced Slack messages. Tasks flow automatically from one person to the next. And because everything is tracked, the team finally has a real audit trail. As Kushal puts it: “A message on Slack isn’t really good evidence. Now we have it documented straight from FloQast.”

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“We’ve always had the right people. Now we’ve got the right tool to do the right work at the right time.”

– Kushal Malde, Head of Financial Control

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Time to Think Commercially

With the time they’ve recovered, the team has shifted from pure number-crunching to strategic work that the rest of the business actually notices. There’s space to investigate what’s driving the numbers, not just confirm that they reconcile. Now the team is working on improving Huel’s capitalisation process, building new controls, and collaborating with teams outside finance.

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“Before, we were seen as the purse string holders. Now we can actually give the business insights into how they’re spending, what that means from a bottom line, and what we need to think about going forward.”

– Sophie Scott, Financial Reporting Manager

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Kushal’s management accountants are now tackling key commercial questions: the 'why' behind the numbers, their significance, and the resulting calls to action. That shift was impossible when reconciliations consumed every available hour.

Beyond the Close

Huel didn’t stop at month-end. The team adopted multiple FloQast capabilities including AI Matching, Journal Entry Management, and Compliance – driven in part by a company-wide push toward AI adoption. “When we’re looking at software, we’re also asking the companies about their AI journey and what they envisage in the future,” said Kushal. “The thing that was really great for us was that AI is at the top of FloQast’s agenda as well, and that resonates with us.”

Huel’s finance team is already seeing the practical payoff. The auto-reconciliation feature signs off balances that haven’t changed, removing tasks before the team even starts. And the calendar feature, which predicts when month-end will finish, gives the whole team visibility into what’s on track and what’s dragging. “Using FloQast means that we’re able to push forward with AI,” said Sophie. “They’re championing AI in their tools, and it just makes month-end more effective and audits more effective.”

Work and Life, Balanced

Before FloQast, late nights were standard – nine or ten o’clock finishes during month-end. Now the team uses Huel’s on-site gym, its wellness centre, and leaves the office at a reasonable hour.

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“Since implementing FloQast, I actually have the time to go to the gym. I can walk my dogs. I can train for a marathon. There’s time to do other things and there’s more to life than just month-end.”

– Sophie Scott, Financial Reporting Manager

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A year ago, the month-end was everything. Now, it's just one part of the job. And the team has the headspace to prove that finance can be more than the department that holds the purse strings at Huel.