Scaling Without Headcount: What Enterprise Accounting Teams Are Actually Doing Right Now

Here's a sentence no accounting leader wants to hear from their CFO: "As we grow, we will not be expanding our accounting headcount."

And yet, that's more or less the reality Amber Moss, VP and Controller at Bazaarvoice, is working with today. Her CFO has made it clear that growth doesn't automatically mean more accountants. It means smarter systems, leaner processes, and technology doing the heavy lifting. "As we scale," Amber told us, "we need technology to support the accountants here today instead of more headcount."

She's not alone in that pressure. Kelby Lombardi, GL Accounting Manager at Epicor, is operating under the same kinds of issues. Open positions are harder to fill. Burnout is real. And the expectation — from leadership, from the profession, from new talent entering the workforce — is that accounting teams will operate not just faster, but more strategically.

So how do you actually do that? We sat down with Amber and Kelby to find out.

The Problem Is Infrastructure, Not Effort.

Both Amber and Kelby both implemented FloQast after previously using BlackLine, and both had the same core frustration: the software was getting in the way of the close, not accelerating it.

Kelby's team at Epicor was manually uploading reconciliations into BlackLine. Every change, every iteration, every prior-period adjustment required IT involvement. "Our software was the problem," she said plainly. "They were preventing us from shortening our close."

For Amber's team at Bazaarvoice — a SaaS company with 25 accountants split between Austin and Lithuania — the situation was even more telling. After seven years on BlackLine, they'd quietly stopped using it for checklists. They'd moved those back to Excel. When your team reverts to spreadsheets to avoid your close management software, that's a sign.

The fix was getting infrastructure that actually worked with how accountants work, not against it.

From 10 Days to 5 — and the Road to Day Three

When Epicor made the switch to FloQast, the results were immediate. Close time dropped from 10 days to 5. Half of their close time, immediately gone.

But Kelby isn't stopping there. She's got a three-year FloQast roadmap and an ambitious target: a three-day close. Getting there requires two things working in tandem: cleaner data and smarter automation.

On the data side, Epicor is doing the unglamorous work of cleaning up years of accumulated ERP messiness. It's not the most appealing project, but as FloQast’s Cam Sterrett put it during the panel: "If the kitchen isn't clean, it has a huge impact on what you can actually do within it."

On the automation side, the biggest target on Kelby's list is software capitalization — a process that currently involves pulling inputs from multiple spreadsheets, combining them manually, and producing a journal entry. She estimates that six to seven hours per accountant, per week are now gone, with the right automation. That's a meaningful chunk of someone's working life handed back to them.

Amber's team went from 11 days to 7 and is targeting further reductions next year, using FloQast's dashboards to pinpoint exactly where the remaining bottlenecks live.

The Hardest Part Isn't the Technology; It's the Team.

Here's the thing about tenured accounting teams: they're good at what they do. Really good. And when you've been doing something a particular way for five or ten years, the suggestion that you should do it differently can feel less like an opportunity and more like an accusation.

It’s called change management, and there’s probably no more corporate term in the business lexicon.

Amber is navigating this exact challenge. Her team is experienced, capable, and like most accounting teams, deeply accustomed to their own workflows. Getting them to trade shared Excel spreadsheets for automated processes requires a mindset shift. They’re not leaving Excel — what accountant would willingly do so? It’s all about evolving the way they approach the process.

Her approach: rather than pushing change top-down, she identified the five team members most interested in AI and built an internal pilot group. They're exploring where automation could actually help (contract amendments, credit rebuilds, and return authorizations are high on the list), running brainstorming sessions, and sharing what they learn with the broader team. The goal is to find the highest-pain processes first, then figure out how to fix them. 

Kelby is taking a similarly deliberate approach at Epicor. All people managers are enrolled in a six-week AI course, building actual agents and bringing those back to their teams as working demonstrations. They've also started running lunch-and-learns specifically designed to help accountants make the mental shift from preparer to reviewer. "It's a hard mindset shift," Kelby acknowledged. "We've been doing lunch and learns to really prepare our accountants to switch that focus — to let AI take over the doing, but then they need to start reviewing."

That framing matters. AI does not replace accountants. Instead, AI replaces the most mundane parts of the job — the repetitive data manipulation, the manual uploads, the hours lost to reconciliation mechanics — and frees up the person to do the thinking. 

Human in the Loop, and Proud of It

Neither Amber nor Kelby are racing to hand everything over to AI unchecked. Both organizations are moving carefully, and for good reason.

Amber is candid about hallucinations being a real issue for general LLMs on the market. "You still need human intervention for all of this," she said. "We need people who know what they're doing, so they know whether the output is correct or not." Epicor has a written AI policy — one that's apparently revised on a near-weekly basis as the landscape shifts.

This is exactly the right instinct. AI in accounting should not remove human judgment, but rather, it should redirect it. When a skilled accountant isn't spending seven hours a week pushing data through spreadsheets, they can spend that time on the analysis, the variance explanations, the strategic conversations that actually move the business.

That's a better job. And it's a better argument for attracting new talent into a profession that has a very real pipeline problem.

The Talent Reality — and Why Technology Is the Answer

Kelby put it simply: "The pressure today isn't just to be accurate. It's to be fast, resilient, and strategic. Talent shortages are here to stay. Teams are leaner, open positions are hard to fill, and burnout is a real problem."

Amber is optimistic, though, in a way that feels earned. "I'm hopeful that, with AI, it will actually make people coming out of college do more interesting things right off the bat," she said. Instead of spending the first few years of a career adding things up and manipulating data, new accountants can have a genuine impact from day one.

That's the real opportunity here. The accounting profession has an image problem partly because so much of the work, for so long, has been the kind of work that doesn't require the skills accountants spent years developing. Technology changes that equation. It handles the mechanical work so the humans can do the human work.

What "Enterprise-Ready" Actually Means

One thread that ran through the entire conversation: for enterprise teams, software that requires constant IT support is more of a second job than it is a solution. Both Kelby and Amber highlighted ease of use as a core deciding factor when they switched to FloQast. Not just ease of implementation (though that mattered — Amber said training was barely necessary, given how intuitive the system is), but ease of ongoing use for a distributed global team.

For Kelby's CAO, the turning point was the dashboard. Real-time global close visibility, no manual updates, no outdated status reports. The ability to walk into a leadership conversation and speak confidently about where the close actually stands? That's not a nice-to-have for an enterprise. It's the whole point.

For Amber, it was the Excel integration. Accountants live in Excel. Software that fights that reality creates friction. Software that embraces it creates adoption.

The Bottom Line

The CFO mandate is real: do more with the team you have. The talent shortage is real. Burnout is real. And the answer to all of it is infrastructure.

Kelby and Amber are building accounting operations that can scale without a corresponding headcount increase. They're doing it through cleaner data, targeted automation, thoughtful change management, and a clear-eyed view of what AI can and can't do right now.

Technology isn't a magic wand. But in the hands of teams who know their processes, understand their pain points, and are willing to shift how they work — it's a genuine force multiplier.

The close isn't just getting shorter. The job is getting better.