How Found Became Audit-Ready with Continuous Close | Rillet Case Study

The Challenge

A backlog, an approaching audit, and no transaction-level history to show for it

When Anupam Sadananda joined Found as its first internal accountant, the July books were being closed in mid-September. The company had been running on a combination of an external bookkeeping firm, a part-time external bookkeeper, and QuickBooks Online since inception. The setup had carried Found to this point. It wasn't going to carry it much further.

Tens of thousands of fee transactions post to Found's corporate accounts every month. All of it was reconciled manually: export to Sheets, collapse into one aggregate journal entry, upload to QuickBooks. A 5-6 day process just to reach a starting line, producing a single opaque number with no transaction-level history behind it.

Two things made the status quo untenable. A first external audit was approaching, and QuickBooks couldn't produce the transaction-level trail the team needed. And a 12-14 day close left no room for anything else.

"We want to be audit-ready. We want to have controls in place. We want a more robust ERP that would help us grow with us as we get more complex as a business." - Anupam Sadananda, Senior Accounting Manager at Found

Before Rillet

• July books closing in mid-September — a two-month backlog on day one
• Cash reconciliation taking 5-6 days across tens of thousands of transactions in Google Sheets
• Aggregate journal entries with no transaction-level audit trail
• 12-14 day close leaving no capacity for anything beyond getting books closed
• First external audit approaching with no audit-ready infrastructure
• Partner payout reports manually generated and sent on day 10 each month

After Rillet

• Soft close by day 5, with 90-95% confidence in the numbers
• Cash reconciliation down from 5-6 days to 1 day (6x faster)
• Full transaction-level audit trail, SOC 1 & SOC 2 compliant from day one
• Partner payout reports automated and sent on day 3 instead of day 10
• Accounting repositioned as a strategic thought partner to product and engineering
• Aura Flows automating manual journal entries that used to live in Google Sheets

The Solution

Transaction-level visibility, rule-based matching, and an audit trail that actually holds up

Rillet gives finance teams the same real-time view of cash that their banking infrastructure already has. For Found, that meant moving from a monthly black box of manual journal entries to transaction-level visibility inside the ERP — with auto-matching thousands of invoices each month and rule-based matching that routes and recognizes other transactions automatically using string patterns from bank descriptions.

Cash reconciliation dropped from 5-6 days to one. The close moved from 12-14 days toward 5. On the audit side, two things gave Found's team and their auditors confidence: Rillet's SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliance, and the fact that Rillet's AI generates human-readable rationale from a controlled, visible input. Configurable checkpoints tied to materiality thresholds are documented, tested, and version-controlled.

"The fact that the AI is using data that's already in the platform gives auditors comfort. We're not feeding it something they can't see." -Anupam Sadananda, Senior Accounting Manager at Found

The implementation itself — which Anupam had braced to be a 12-month ordeal based on a prior legacy ERP rollout — wrapped in 6-8 weeks.

The Results

Day 5 reporting, and a team that does more than close

With close time recovered, Found's two-person finance team redirected toward work that actually moves the business.

Partner payout reporting, automated. A cumbersome monthly process — pulling data from BigQuery, transferring it to a separate template, and manually generating 15-20 emails and partner Excel reports — is now fully automated. Reports that were previously sent on day 10 now go out on day 3.

Manual journal entries, automated. Benefits vendor data from multiple vendor portals, previously reformatted manually in Sheets, is now built in Aura Flow, a scheduled workflow that runs itself. One more recurring task removed from the close.

With that capacity freed up, Anupam has repositioned the accounting function as a strategic thought partner to product and engineering — researching accounting guidance for new product launches and working toward giving leadership mid-month visibility on revenue and OpEx before month-end arrives.

"Finance is already seen as a strategic partner, but accounting often gets left at the back of the bus. Being able to position ourselves as a strategic thought partner when it comes to new product launches is definitely valuable." - Anupam Sadananda, Senior Accounting Manager at Found

By the Numbers

Before and After, Line by Line

"Do you want to live in 2026, or do you want to live in 2050? Legacy players are having to fight to keep up. Rillet is at the forefront." - Anupam Sadananda, Senior Accounting Manager at Found