How Iron Storage closes 15 entities in two days with an accounting department of one

Faraz Hemani is the CEO and founder of Iron Storage, which owns and operates 30 self-storage facilities. Underneath those 30 properties sit about 15 legal entities: property holding companies, property management companies, and the structures that connect them. In Self Storage, investors and lenders want to know what each facility earns, what it spends, and whether the portfolio is trending the right way–before DualEntry, Faraz was answering those questions out of 15 separate QuickBooks accounts.

The Problem: A CEO doing the books

"Our accounting definitely felt like a black box," Faraz says. "With 15 different QuickBooks instances, all the data was siloed. Any comprehensive or portfolio level reporting required us to export reports and manually stitch them together."

Iron Storage doesn't run one business, it runs 30, and it needed answers across all of them: which facilities were underperforming, where expenses were climbing, how regions compared. None of those questions could be found inside a single QuickBooks file, so answering them meant exporting, pasting, and formatting until a picture appeared.

The close took 7 to 10 days. Most of it was manual work in spreadsheets, and all of it had to be reviewed by Faraz himself.

"We started looking for a better way when the strain on our accounting team grew, and when my personal involvement in the accounting process grew to a level that I didn't want to be involved in. It felt quite frustrating that a simple accounting process was taking so much manpower, so much effort and involvement. With the pace of technology and the tools that are out there, it shouldn't be taking us this long."

The Solution

Two things sparked Iron Storage's interest in DualEntry. The first was the existing Cubby integration, since Cubby runs the storage operation and moving its data by hand was already part of the problem. The second was access. Faraz wanted to build his own close and reporting workflows on top of his own data, and most accounting software will not let you.

"What surprised me most in the sales process was the level of commitment DualEntry had to make the data open and accessible. That's not common in traditional financial reporting software. Those tend to be clunky, legacy and opinionated. They want you to close and do accounting in a certain way."

With NextDay Migration, Iron Storage connected its QuickBooks accounts, clicked once, and left. "Accounts, data and transactions started populating automatically and it ran overnight, so we had a clean instance to come and play with when we came back the next day."

Implementation took a week or two, against expectations set by everything he had heard about ERP projects. "I was nervous going into implementation, just having heard about how difficult some of these ERP implementations have been for other companies." What he got instead was DualEntry's team reconciling the new system against the old one without being asked, catching possible issues proactively, and taking work off his team.

What Iron Storage runs on now:

• One ledger across 15 entities, with portfolio consolidated views and custom reports built for banks, lenders, and investors, formatted natively instead of assembled in spreadsheets
• AI categorization and matching that drives most of the close, with transactions sorted and matched automatically
• Anomaly detection, "Anomaly detection allowed us to proactively catch mistakes and fix them in real time, without having to pour through thousands of transactions to catch them."
• Cubby integration, connecting the storage management platform to the ledger
• Open API for custom close and reporting workflows. "If we have custom processes and workflows that we're used to doing, DualEntry allows us to do it our way, because we can take data via API and implement whatever process we want around it."
• MCP server, which is where the team goes to ask questions. "One of our team's favorite features is the DualEntry MCP that allows us to take all the data in DualEntry and plug it into the tools our team is used to using. You don't have to be a data analyst to get really incredible insights out of our accounting software."

Results

The close went from 7-10 days to 2. The accounting department is now Faraz, and his part takes about three hours.

"Our close process is down to 2 days, with no other manpower required besides myself, and AI driving a majority of the process."

The reporting problem inverted. Consolidated data in one place turned the portfolio questions from a spreadsheet project into a conversation. "I can ask questions like: where do we have opportunities portfolio wide to reduce expenses, or what are the worrying trends in revenue across this group of facilities in this area of the country. That allows us to take those insights back to our management and operations team with data to hang our hat on."

Hiring changed shape too. Iron Storage is not staffing an accounting function against growth. "We need much less manpower, and now the folks we bring in are focused more on strategy and things that will actually push the needle for the business, rather than manual tasks or repetitive bookkeeping."

"Finance and accounting for us used to be something that kept us up at night. It was a long, cumbersome process managing 15 entities in old, outdated software. Now we look forward to doing our close and getting into the system, because it's a place where we actually learn and gain insight about our business, rather than something we have to wrestle and fight to get right."

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