October 23, 2025
At FloQast, we’ve experienced firsthand the transformative power of monorepos. Our journey from managing over 2,000 polyrepos to consolidating into a handful of well-structured monorepos has fundamentally changed how we build, deploy, and maintain our financial close management platform. Here’s why we believe monorepos are a game-changer for modern software development.
The Polyrepo Pain Points We Left Behind
Before our monorepo migration, our development workflow was fragmented across thousands of repositories. Each service, library, and component lived in isolation, creating a web of dependencies that became increasingly difficult to manage. Coordinating releases across multiple repos meant:
- Version Hell: Keeping track of compatible versions across 2,000+ repositories was a nightmare.
- Inconsistent Standards: Different repos evolved with different coding standards, tooling, and practices.
- Release Coordination Complexity: Rolling out features spanning multiple services required careful orchestration across numerous repositories.
- Developer Friction: Simple changes often required pull requests across multiple repos, slowing down development velocity.
The Monorepo Revolution at FloQast
Our transition to a handful of strategically organized monorepos has delivered remarkable improvements across our entire development lifecycle.
Streamlined Release Process
Perhaps the most dramatic improvement has been in our release process. What once required coordinating deployments across dozens of repositories can now be managed as a single, atomic operation. When we need to ship a feature that touches our API, frontend, and background services, we can:
- Test the entire feature stack together in a single build
- Deploy everything simultaneously with confidence
- Roll back the entire feature as one unit if issues arise
- Track the complete feature lifecycle in one place
This consolidation has reduced our release cycle time by 60% and virtually eliminated the integration issues that plagued our polyrepo setup.
Consistency Across All Layers
One of the unexpected benefits of our monorepo approach has been the dramatic improvement in consistency across our technology stack. With shared tooling, linting rules, and development practices enforced repository-wide, we’ve achieved:
- Unified Code Standards: ESLint, Prettier, and custom rules applied consistently across frontend, backend, and infrastructure code.
- Shared Dependencies: Common libraries and utilities are automatically kept in sync across all services.
- Consistent Testing Practices: Test patterns, mocking strategies, and coverage requirements are standardized.
- Unified Documentation: API documentation, architectural decisions, and development guides live alongside the code they describe.
This consistency has significantly reduced the cognitive load for developers moving between different parts of our system and has made code reviews more effective.
The Foundation: Robust CI/CD and Micro Build Targets
The success of our monorepo strategy hinges on two critical technical investments: a sophisticated CI/CD pipeline and granular build targeting.
Intelligent CI/CD Pipeline
Our CI/CD system is the backbone that makes our monorepo scalable. Key features include:
- Change Detection: Only builds and tests code that has actually changed, dramatically reducing build times.
- Parallel Execution: Independent services can be built, tested, and deployed in parallel.
- Smart Caching: Build artifacts are cached and reused across pipeline runs.
- Failure Isolation: Issues in one service don’t block deployments of unrelated services.
Micro Build Targets
Rather than treating the monorepo as one massive build, we’ve implemented fine-grained build targets that allow us to:
- Build only the specific services affected by a change
- Run targeted test suites based on the code modified
- Deploy individual services independently when needed
- Maintain fast feedback loops despite the repository’s size
This approach gives us the benefits of monorepo consistency while preserving the deployment flexibility we had with separate repositories.
Real-World Impact at FloQast
The numbers speak for themselves. Since our monorepo transition:
- Repository Simplification: We went from 9.5 repositories per engineer to just 0.7—a 93% reduction in repository overhead.
- Developer Velocity: We expect feature development time to reduce by at least 25% due to eliminated cross-repo coordination.
- AI-Enhanced Development: Consolidating our repos has significantly improved our AI coding tool effectiveness—Cursor can now find context much better across our centralized codebase, leading to increased PR rates and more accurate code suggestions.
- Bug Resolution: We expect issue resolution time to decrease by 25% with improved visibility into system interactions.
- Onboarding: New developer onboarding time has been cut by 10% due to a simplified repository structure.
- Release Reliability: We now maintain a predictable release velocity as we move forward.
Lessons Learned and Best Practices
Our monorepo journey wasn’t without challenges. Here are the key lessons we learned:
Start with Strong Tooling
Invest heavily in your build and CI/CD infrastructure before migrating. The tooling is what makes monorepos scale.
Establish Clear Boundaries
Even within a monorepo, maintain logical service boundaries. Just because code is in the same repository doesn’t mean it should be tightly coupled.
Gradual Migration
We didn’t migrate all 2,000+ repos overnight. We started with our most interconnected services and gradually consolidated related repositories—and we’re still completing that effort.
Team Ownership Models
Maintain clear ownership of different monorepo sections while encouraging cross-team collaboration on shared components.
Be Ready to Educate Your Developers
Engineers love the speed of code-to-cloud deployment and often see monorepos as introducing friction. Proper education of your developer community is critical to ensure this decision is adopted successfully. Take time to demonstrate the long-term benefits and show how the initial adjustment period leads to greater velocity and consistency.
The Future Is Monorepo
For teams building complex, interconnected systems like FloQast’s platform, monorepos offer a compelling path forward. The key is recognizing that monorepos aren’t just about code organization—they’re about enabling better collaboration, consistency, and delivery practices. With the right tooling and processes, monorepos can deliver the best of both worlds: the simplicity and consistency of unified development with the flexibility and performance of a microservices architecture.
The transition requires investment in tooling and process changes, but for teams struggling with polyrepo complexity, the payoff in developer productivity and system reliability makes it a worthwhile journey.
Ready to explore monorepos for your team? Start small, invest in tooling, and prepare to transform how your team builds software.