Tony Burian
November 12, 2025
At FloQast, reliability isn’t just a technical objective—it’s a core part of how we earn and maintain customer trust. As our Accounting Transformation Platform has grown to serve thousands of accounting teams across multiple regions, our engineering organization has had to evolve how we respond to and learn from production incidents.
Over the past year, we’ve rebuilt our incident management process from the ground up to meet the expectations of our expanding enterprise customer base. What started as a few Slack messages and ad-hoc meetings has become a structured, transparent, and data-driven framework designed to minimize impact, accelerate recovery, and continuously improve reliability.
This is the story of how we got there—and what we learned along the way.
The Challenge: Scaling Beyond “All Hands on Deck”
As many SaaS organizations experience, early-stage incident response often looks like this: alerts fire, engineers swarm, updates happen in chat threads, and someone eventually writes up a summary afterward. It works—until it doesn’t.
At FloQast, as our product suite and customer footprint grew, this approach began to strain:
- Incidents spanned multiple products and teams.
- Communication to internal stakeholders and customers wasn’t always consistent.
- Root cause analyses varied in quality and timeliness.
- SLA reporting required manual reconciliation across systems.
We realized that what once worked for a fast-moving startup no longer supported the reliability expectations of our enterprise customers. To continue scaling responsibly, we needed a unified, repeatable, and measurable incident management process.
Our Solution: A Framework Built for Consistency and Clarity
We began by defining what “good” incident management looks like for a SaaS platform company. The framework had to be:
- Automated: Triggered by monitoring and alerting systems, not manual recognition.
- Consistent: Using a single taxonomy for priority, communication, and resolution steps.
- Transparent: Providing visibility to internal stakeholders and customers alike.
- Measurable: Tied to SLAs and post-incident metrics.
The result is FloQast’s Incident Management Framework—a structured lifecycle that ensures every incident follows a clear path from detection to closure, with accountability at every step.
How It Works: From Detection to Resolution
1. Detect and Classify
Incidents can originate from system monitoring, automated SLO breaches, or customer reports. Once detected, the first step is classification. Every incident is assigned a priority (P0–P3) based on multiple factors—including the number of services affected and the number of customers impacted.
By using these inputs, our teams can quickly determine the right level of response, communication, and escalation. This helps ensure that we respond proportionally to both the technical and customer impact of each issue.
- P0: Critical outages or major customer impact.
- P1: High-impact or performance degradation.
- P2: Isolated defects or limited impact.
- P3: Minor or backlog-level issues.
Only P0 and P1 incidents trigger full incident workflows, including an automatically created incident bridge (video conference), a dedicated collaboration channel, and a placeholder in our ticketing system. Lower-priority issues remain tracked but don’t escalate to the same level of response.
2. Assign a Commander
Every incident has one—and only one—Incident Commander. This role provides leadership, context, and coordination. The Commander isn’t necessarily the first responder; in fact, we intentionally separate the person resolving the issue from the person running the incident. This ensures that while engineers are focused on fixing, someone is focused on communicating, documenting, and guiding the process.
3. Communicate Clearly
For P0 and P1 incidents, internal and external communication standards are defined upfront:
- Dedicated incident channels for responders.
- Consistent internal updates for leadership and customer success.
- Customer-facing updates when appropriate via our public Status Page.
By predefining when and how communication happens, we reduce the cognitive load during critical moments—and ensure customers are informed, not surprised.
4. Contain, Resolve, and Learn
Once mitigation is in progress, the focus shifts to resolution and reflection. Every major incident concludes with a Retrospective and Root Cause Analysis (RCA). The Commander leads this effort, partnering with engineering and customer success to document what happened, why it happened, and how we’ll prevent it in the future.
Each RCA is reviewed and approved by product leadership before publication, reinforcing accountability and creating a feedback loop that improves both technical systems and processes.
Measuring Impact: Aligning Incidents to SLAs
An important part of this maturity journey was introducing a quantitative link between incidents and SLAs. Not every outage contributes equally to SLA impact; the weight depends on the priority and customer reach of the incident.
For example:
- A widespread P0 outage affecting many customers fully contributes to SLA downtime.
- A smaller P1 issue may contribute partially.
- Isolated or internal issues may not count toward SLA at all.
By standardizing this logic, our reporting now accurately reflects the real-world impact of incidents, allowing us to measure reliability the same way our customers experience it.
What We Learned
Rebuilding incident management wasn’t just about new tools—it was about culture. A few lessons stood out:
- Clarity beats complexity. The simpler the rules, the easier it is to act quickly under pressure.
- Automation enables focus. The more we automate (creating bridges, channels, and tickets), the more energy engineers can spend resolving, not coordinating.
- Accountability drives improvement. Assigning a single Commander ensures ownership without chaos.
- Transparency builds trust. Customers appreciate honest, timely updates—even when things go wrong.
Most importantly, we learned that incident management isn’t a static policy. It’s a living system that grows with your product, your team, and your customers.
Looking Ahead
As FloQast continues to expand globally, our reliability practices will evolve alongside our platform. The foundation we’ve built—clear priorities, defined roles, automated workflows, and data-driven SLAs—positions us to scale confidently while maintaining the level of trust our customers expect.
Incident management may not be glamorous, but it’s one of the strongest signals of an engineering organization’s maturity. For us, it represents the discipline and empathy required to operate enterprise software at scale.
Join Us
If building resilient, customer-focused systems excites you, we’re hiring.
Explore open roles at floqast.com/careers.