Death to the Status Meeting: How WP Engine Turbocharges Accounting Growth with FloQast

When Eric Domagalski joined Austin-based tech company WP Engine, his job was clear: Get the accounting team ready for whatever the company did next.Following a period of that saw the company surpass $130 million in annual recurring revenue, raise $250 million, and open international offices, Domagalski wasn’t exactly sure what the company’s next step would be, but he was sure his team would be ready.“My goal was to get the team in a place where we could be ready for any move the company could choose to make — whether that was a potential acquisition or other possible material corporate event that might require a financial review of the company,” said Domagalski. “The whole point was to not be a bottleneck and to support extracting value out of whatever route the business decides to take.”

Speed Kills

Integrating FloQast with Oracle Netsuite, the company was able to cut its monthly close in half.“We were looking for two things: operational efficiency and accuracy. We’re building a sustainable, repeatable model to close the books and build quality financials,” said Domagalski. “We also need to be positive that we have everything and that it’s accurate. FloQast really offered more than I thought it would. We were roughly on a 10-day close, and now we’re at five. We slashed it in half.”

Goodbye, Status Update Meetings

Ultimately, the level of transparency FloQast helped inject into WP Engine’s month-end close helped render the much-dreaded status update meetings uncessessary, something unheard of in most accounting circles. “FloQast helps drive accountability,” said Domagalski. “We can look at an outstanding task and identify whether someone was working on it or if there were any issues that made the deadline unrealistic. It got to the point where we got rid of most of our close meetings until the very tail end of the process. Ultimately, FloQast ended up eliminating those meetings altogether.”

The Flux of the Situation

Utilizing FloQast’s new Flux Analysis module, WP Engine was able to perform fluctuation analysis without the bottlenecks that made the former process time-consuming and maddening.“It could be really stressful for both the person pulling and formatting the reports and the people who were waiting to do the flux analysis,” Domagalski said. “FloQast completely simplified how we approached the flux. When someone is done with their account, they can go ahead and do their flux; there’s no waiting for someone else to finish.”