How Nelo went from a 10-day close to a 3-day close without hiring

Nelo is a lending fintech company based in Mexico, where the average loan runs about $35. That number is the entire accounting problem, because tiny tickets arrive in enormous volume and all of it has to land in a ledger that satisfies two countries at once. The operating business sits in Mexico, while a US entity in New York employs staff, raises capital, and finances the Mexican corporation. Roberto Carroz, who runs accounting at Nelo, has spent 20 years in the profession and has no interest in spending his time on data entry.

The Problem: Three disconnected systems

Nelo ran two QuickBooks accounts, plus a third piece of software to consolidate them, and none of the three could talk to the others.

"With that accounting setup we had three challenges," Roberto says. "One was we cannot connect that to an API, so the lending business information was not flowing automatically. The second one was having two accounts, so we needed to log out and log in several times during the day. And the third one is having a software that can consolidate everything outside QuickBooks."

The first of those was the expensive one, since a lending book generates transaction volume continuously and, without an API, every bit of it reached the ledger by hand.

"The complexity of the accounting in a lending company is really high due to the amount of data that we have to flow to the system, and also because we have several accounting rules that we need to apply for each country."

The close took 8 to 10 business days, and the sheer volume of manual input left almost no room to check the work before the books went out.

"At that time, closing the books was a really challenging process due to all the manual input that we have to do. Also, we didn't have enough processes to review the information, so reconciliation was a little bit hard to do."

For a company that answers to investors and audit firms in two jurisdictions, a close that slow and that hand-built eventually costs more than time. Roberto went looking at legacy vendors first, and the implementation timelines came back at six to nine months. "That was not acceptable for us."

The Solution

An accounting team that connected its own ERP in a day and a half

Nelo chose DualEntry for the APIs, the integrations that already existed, and the people behind them, and then the accounting team ran the implementation itself without pulling in an engineer.

"We were able to connect our database to DualEntry in like one day and a half, which is amazing for us. And after that, the other external data sources that we use outside the business operation, it was also really fast and really easy to use. We didn't need to use any engineer. We can do it ourselves."

What Nelo runs on now:

• AWS API connection: the entire lending operation flows into DualEntry automatically, every day
• Bank and credit card APIs: a US bank and a corporate card push transactions straight into the system
• MCP server: the team uploads statements, invoices, and accruals, and DualEntry posts the journal entries. "They already know where to post it and on which account, because they have all the history."
• Classifications and sub-classifications: P&L and balance sheet sliced by product
• Multi-entity: both entities in one ledger, which ended the log-out, log-in cycle and retired the third-party consolidator
• Mexican tax localization: built jointly with DualEntry and a local partner

Results

Nelo’s close dropped from 8 to 10 business days down to 3, and the daily API feed is what got it there. Rather than assembling a month of lending activity at month end, Nelo's ledger updates every morning, which turns reconciliation into a review instead of a scramble.

The second result matters more for a company that intends to keep growing, because Roberto is not planning to hire against volume.

"DualEntry will help us a lot to maintain our very small team and to do many more things with the same team that we have today. It will also help us to document our processes and segregate the responsibilities of each one of the team."

On the stack itself, his verdict is short: "The MCP is working amazing, the API has no lags and it's working very well."

Roberto spends about eight hours most weekends on a mountain bike, and he finds the same principle running through both halves of his life. "One of the similarities of accounting and cycling is discipline. You have to keep your books and the records on a daily basis."

His advice to accountants still sitting on a broken system is shorter than that.

"Don't be afraid of technology. APIs and MCPs are going to ease the amount of work and the amount of reconciliation that you're going to do. So go ahead and don't be afraid."

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