 |
VOOZH | about |
|
VOOZH | about |
We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game.
Check your inbox for a confirmation email where you can adjust your preferences and even join additional groups.
Follow TNS on your favorite social media networks.
Become a TNS follower on LinkedIn.
Check out the latest featured and trending stories while you wait for your first TNS newsletter.
Food delivery service DoorDash embarked on a three-year journey to bring its internal accounting system into the real-time era using Snowflake.
DoorDash used Snowflake to create a central cloud-based hub for its financial data, one that is flexible and can respond to requests in real time, according to Matthew Graveen, DoorDash senior manager, accounting data and systems, speaking at Snowflake Summit 2025.
As a result of centralizing its accounting data, DoorDash business analysts get data more quickly, and auditing can be done nearly instantaneously.
The key? “You can’t automate things without centralization,” he said.
Today’s accounting systems are fractured affairs. Most organizations today suffer from disconnected systems and manual processes. They could pull report data from 35 to 50 or more systems. A report may be composed of an Excel workbook and compiled with different data from other Excel spreadsheets, Oracle NetSuite, SAP, Coupa and other sources.
This complexity leads to stale and incorrect data and reports that require days to compile.
Plus, ERP systems themselves are difficult to reconfigure and upgrade, even as a company’s business needs may change frequently. Large upgrades of existing ERP systems can range into the millions.
A closing process for accounting can take multiple days. A two-day close is pretty good; a 10-day close is more typical.
What slows them down? Incomplete data, probably.
“And at the end of the day, you’re pulling from one spreadsheet to another spreadsheet to another spreadsheet, and then you finally put it into your ERP system,” he said. “We just love wasting time on spreadsheets.”
And this is why auditing is such a pain these days. Where did this number come from? How did you get that figure? Worse yet, what if someone else comes up with a number that is different than the one you’ve come up with? Now you have to reconcile the two.
Or someone could change the product name and break the VLOOKUP. An auditor who comes along later will have to spend three times longer trying to untangle how that number came about.
Nonetheless, accounting offices are compelled to produce data-driven reports more quickly.
Organizations have “changed the way they’ve been operating,” Graveen said. “People want their information today. They don’t want to wait eight hours to get a report. They want to be able to make real-time decisions. And if you don’t, your business is going to lag and fall behind.”
Graveen’s original role with DoorDash was to manage the integration of Wolt, an online delivery service DoorDash acquired in 2022.
If you can automate this process and centralize the data, a business could “literally make decisions 10 times faster,” Graveen said.
Graveen’s idea for DoorDash was to set up a central repository where the definitive version of each piece of accounting data could be found.
“Our vision is stick it in Snowflake. Model our information properly, have an integration layer to interchange data, quality tools or catalog tools, our dashboarding tools, our transaction records, our ERP system, as well as any kind of AI framework,” Graveen said. “So then we have one harmonized platform.”
What Graveen said he was trying to avoid is a scenario where no one in the company knows the definitive source of any piece of data.
“This is where every bit of information that an accounting and finance user needs, in one location,” he said.
The company uses a number of data integration tools to get data into Snowflake, including DBT and Fivetran. Data can also be copied over to another third-party application, called Hightouch.
Data is typically refreshed every five minutes.
“We put a serialization number [on] each transaction that comes from our third-party app system, and we are able to track those particular records from end-to-end to allow for an automated reconciliation process,” Graveen said.
In the old process, a payroll analyst may have to “download the data from ADP, put it into Excel, make it pretty so it could load into NetSuite and then push it off into our ERP system,” Graveen said.
Now, the data is accessible in one location.
As a result, auditor meetings have shrunk to 10 minutes or so, because what they are asking for can be found easily.
Even better, the company has saved thousands of hours yearly by eliminating the manual processes that cause disruptions. Graveen used to handle an average of 34 process incidents a month; now it’s down to about one a month.
And the company can make faster decisions with fresher data.
“Because if we’re able to be able to see a difference in trends day-over-day, we’re going to be able to make better decisions over the course of time,” Graveen said.
Snowflake Summit 2025 presentations can be viewed after free registration.
(Update 7/11/2025: This story has been updated to clarify the role of the NetSuite ERP system within DoorDash).
