How a stablecoin infrastructure company cut a 45 day consolidated close to 20

Obsidiam is a LatAm stablecoin infrastructure company with operations in Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Switzerland, the European Union, and Mexico. Their accounting set up included 6 operating entities, 5 different base currencies, and thousands of transactions a day moving across a shared treasury. 

The Problem

Every jurisdiction had its own accounting team, with each team having its own siloed local accounting software. 

"Before DualEntry it was not only manual, but really fragmented for us," says Carlos Trujillo, CFO. "As a group, we have six entities and a seventh one coming in. We handle thousands of transactions daily. And the more we grow, the more complex the controlling becomes."

The monthly close for each jurisdiction took 15 days, with manual consolidation adding another 30 on top of it at the end of every quarter. Currency revaluation occurred by hand at the end of each cycle, and the numbers arrived late enough that nobody could act on them.

That created another problem, and that the only way to see how the group was performing day to day was to pull the operations team into the accounting department.

"This in a governance manner is not really correct," Trujillo says. For a company regulated in three jurisdictions and heading into its first financial audits, that answer had a shelf life.

Meanwhile the CFO was the single point of visibility and failure. "I was the only person that had full visibility on all the entities."

The Solution

Growth at the end of last year forced the decision. Obsidiam needed one roof for their 6, and needed it before the auditors arrived.

Implementation time was the deciding constraint. "We were moving at a very fast pace, and we didn't have the time to do a 6-month or 1-year implementation process." The legacy vendors quoted six to twelve months. A vendor referral pointed Trujillo to DualEntry, he recognized other companies already running on it, and getting first-hand access to the DualEntry sandbox closed the deal. 

"I was sold on DualEntry the moment I did a demo and looked at how easy it was to create a consolidated report by selecting or deselecting just the companies of the group that I wanted to include," he says. "I was able to select three of the companies and create consolidated financial statements in a matter of minutes."

DualEntry centralized the accounting for all entities in one general ledger, ran currency revaluation automatically on the consolidated statements, and let bulk upload absorb the volume from roughly 50 accounts across financial institutions. "It really isn't possible to do this on manual work."

The rollout ran self-service, on Obsidiam's schedule, with the DualEntry CX experience team on call. With DualEntry being user friendly alongside the CX team training, Obsidiam’s finance team was fluent in three weeks.

What changed:

• Six entities consolidated in one system instead of six local ledgers
• Consolidated reporting on demand, filtered to any subset of entities, instead of once a quarter
• Automatic currency revaluation across five base currencies
• Bulk upload across roughly 50 financial institution accounts
• Controlling separated from treasury operations, and governance with it

Results

The quarterly consolidated close went from 45 days to 20.

The team running it went from five people to two, and that shorter close now includes several review cycles with management that did not fit in the old timeline.

The operations team went back to operations, leaving an empowered accounting team to own the books. "It has changed my focus, and I can actually have a more strategic approach on the operations of the company," Trujillo says. "Now we have a very strong accounting team that is very capable of handling the accounting operations on a day to day basis."

For a stablecoin company, near real time reporting is not a convenience. Thousands of transactions land across different addresses, different accounts, and different entities at once, and clients, investors, and three sets of regulators all want to see the same clean number.

"For any business or startup that is considering entering a regulated space or is seeking investment, a tool like DualEntry is really valuable to remove focus from the day to day operations and actually focus on what's important, that is strategy and the vision of the company."

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