A Shared Service Center Growing Faster Than Its Systems

Equinox Group runs its accounting through a shared service center that closes the books for Equinox, SoulCycle, and several smaller entities. The business scaled faster than its IT infrastructure, so systems like payroll and point of sale weren't directly connected to the ERP, forcing accountants to fill the gaps manually.

Ashley Randall, Director of Accounting, oversees the balance sheet and helped build the shared service model. “We used to have all these Excel checklists that we were combining into one. Everyone was unsure which checklist they needed to go to, and it was just kind of a mess,” Ashley recalled.

No one could tell from those checklists what was finished, so managers found out at the last minute and each close became a sprint. Emily Childs inherited that close when she took over as VP of Accounting in 2023.

The worst gap was in the payroll process, and at first, it kept her up at night. Payroll at Equinox and SoulCycle is complex. One personal trainer might run sessions for part of a shift and manage the floor for the rest, so a single shift can carry several pay rates and pay codes. To turn all that into journal entries, the team relied on a macro an outside consultant had built about 15 years ago, which the payroll accountants had to patch by hand every time a new pay code came up. Everyone feared the day the consultant retired, or the day the macro simply stopped working.

“Since I started at Equinox, I was always scared that the payroll macro was going to break, and we just wouldn't be able to book payroll. It's just too much data to manually handle.”
— Emily Childs, VP of Accounting

Then there was cash. Bank activity came in every day, but the team had fallen behind on reconciling it.

“It was frightening, because we just weren't reconciling cash on a daily basis, so we didn't know if there were issues,” Emily said.

Moving the Close Into FloQast and Building Agents

Emily's first FloQast demo covered close management and cash reconciliations, two of her problems. Equinox weighed FloQast against its current tool for both. “To put in the work we needed using BlackLine, we would need a lot of IT intervention and IT hours. I knew FloQast was something my team could work on without any help from the outside,” Emily said.

Ashley helped lead the rollout. The Excel checklists moved into Close Management, where Emily can see who is falling behind, reassign work, and check whether the team is on track for the executive team's EBITDA meeting. Daily cash reconciliation moved into FloQast, with AI Matching pairing bank activity to the ledger. To win the team over, Ashley told them to put notes in FloQast, where she could read them instead of emailing to ask where things stood.

Implementing FloQast also helped catch mistakes earlier. Every entity in the shared service center uses the same chart of accounts, so anyone can post to any account. When an entity posts to an account it never uses, FloQast flags it, so Ashley can ask the team about it during the close instead of finding it after the financials are filed.

Then the team turned to FloQast Transform and put AI agents on its largest processes first, starting with payroll. The payroll agent now does in one run what used to take a macro plus a round of manual fixes on every payroll file. Where the old entry was one lump sum, the agent splits it by how the cash will leave the bank, into checks, direct debits and withholdings. The payroll accountants have moved from building the entry to checking it. Once they match the finished entry to the payroll register, it's ready to upload. Built first on Equinox's payroll, the agent was adapted for SoulCycle's by tweaking its prompts.

The agent also ended the team's wait on IT. When a new pay code comes up, the payroll accountants add it themselves with a plain-English prompt, and the change carries into every later run. “Giving my team the ability to easily make changes to the agent has been incredible, because they no longer rely on having IT come help. We run very lean, so it's hard to get IT hours,” Emily said.

Equinox had help on its first builds. Its Forward Deployed Accountant (FDA), the CPA-level FloQast consultant who helps customers design and build their first agents, built the utility agent from the team's sample inputs and outputs. Ashley took on the cash coding agent herself, with the FDA as her go-to expert. It took her about a week. Now, when the team asks for a change, she makes it in about 10 minutes.

“Building the agent turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. I'm not a coder by any means, but I definitely know what it's doing, and I validated it.”
— Ashley Randall, Director of Accounting

From Line-by-Line Prep to Reviewing What Changed

Booking each payroll now takes 30 minutes from start to submitted entry, down from two hours, across at least 12 payroll files a month for Equinox and SoulCycle. With no rules applied by hand, Ashley says the entries are more accurate. Payroll accountants now bring analysis to the executive team's EBITDA meeting instead of scrambling to book payroll.

The biggest shift for Emily is what she can tell leadership. “When I walk my executive management through the close, I feel a lot more comfortable that the numbers are right and that everything has gotten done. I don't even think I realized how much I didn't have visibility into before I could see it on a dashboard. Now I can speak confidently, I know exactly where we are and that there's nothing left to book,” she said.

Matching bank activity to the ledger used to take hours of VLOOKUPs. AI Matching now pairs 98% of transactions automatically. Coding those transactions required a trained preparer to do a ton of legwork. The old coding macro had gone stale because no one on the team could update it. A transaction that shows up only a few times a year could take 20 to 30 minutes to figure out. The cash coding agent went live in October with the team's coding history built in, so anyone on staff can now prepare cash.

Recently, when the usual preparer was out, another staff accountant stepped in, something the team hadn't been able to do before. Besides ending the team's reliance on one trained preparer, the agent should also cut the time. The team expects each large bank account to take an hour or less, down from two to four hours.

“It really is that shift from preparer to reviewer. Sometimes people are worried about their jobs going away when they hear AI agent, but we've been able to show people that these agents can take away a lot of that manual, mundane work,” Emily said.

The same shift happened with utility accruals. Compiling bills across more than 100 clubs took two to three days, and errors crept in when the team ran out of time. Since the September close, the utility agent compiles them in about an hour and flags which bills haven't arrived, so the team starts with the anomalies.

“I'm getting to a point where maybe I can take a PTO day during close, which is crazy. We could not take time off in those first two weeks of the month.”
— Ashley Randall, Director of Accounting

A Priority List of the Work Agents Take On Next

Next, Equinox wants to build agents for the accounting behind its member promotions, like a spa certificate or a free personal training session, and Emily hopes to go beyond the five agents Equinox has committed to.

The accountants keep a priority list of processes to hand to agents, built from the tasks each of them doesn't want to do. The agents in production today are listed below with the work each one handles.

Custom Agents Live

• Payroll: Turns each payroll file into a summary journal entry, pay details by employee and pay code, and any due accruals.
• Cash Coding: Codes bank transactions for every entity from a shared coding file and flags anything it can't place.
• Utility: Compiles utility bills across Equinox's clubs, identifies the bills that haven't arrived, and calculates their accrual.

Emily wants a 7-day close at both Equinox and SoulCycle, and she sees the team's AI agents in FloQast Transform as the way there.

“Those things that keep you up at night are important, because that's where you really need to put your resources. Doing that, particularly with the payroll agent, it's like a weight is lifted from my chest,” Emily said.