In partnership with
The business ….
Sarah Brennan is the Controller at Forge Commerce, a Series B e-commerce infrastructure company based in Chicago. Forge builds the middleware layer between storefronts and fulfilment — $32M ARR, 180 employees, three legal entities operating across the US, Canada, and the UK. The business grew fast enough that its finance infrastructure never caught up. By the time Sarah joined eighteen months ago the close was taking eighteen days, audit prep was a six-week fire drill, and the board had stopped expecting the monthly pack on time.
▶ CRM: Salesforce
▶ ERP: Netsuite
▶ Data Warehouse: Snowflake
▶ Docs: Google Drive
▶ Team Size: 180
"I was spending more time preparing for auditors than running finance. That is not why I took this job."
THE PROBLEM
Intercompany eliminations — the transactions between Forge's US, Canadian, and UK entities — had to be identified, calculated, and posted as manual journal entries in NetSuite every single close. It was a process that took four days on its own, required a deep understanding of all three entities' books, and had zero documentation. If Sarah was unavailable during close, the process stopped entirely.
Audit prep was worse. Every quarter the external auditors would arrive and spend three weeks asking for documentation that had to be assembled from six different systems. Sarah would spend six weeks preparing for and responding to audit requests — six weeks that came directly out of the time she should have been spending running the finance function.
The board pack was consistently ten days late. Not because Sarah was slow — because she simply could not close the books and produce the pack simultaneously..
We had three entities and an 18-day close. Carapace automated the intercompany eliminations, made our audit documentation continuous, and got us to a 7-day close. Our auditors asked what changed. I told them everything.
18→7 days
Close cycle dropped from eighteen days to seven. Audit prep went from six weeks to two days. The board pack has been on time every month for nine consecutive months.
Sarah now runs a finance function instead of a documentation operation.
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