How two accountants close the books at a $150M-backed health company

Well is a healthcare navigation platform based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, backed by more than $150 million from General Catalyst, Valeas Capital Partners, and John Doerr. The platform contracts with large employers, ingests member claims and demographic data, and pays people to take care of themselves. Six years in, Well is doing about $50 million a year.

The Problem: A business model built on incentives, and a ledger built for a coffee shop

Well does not bill like a SaaS company. Customers send a monthly eligibility file, member counts move all year, and Well invoices against actual usage. On top of that sits the part that makes auditors sit up: Well puts its own revenue on the line against the outcomes it promises.

"We'll go at risk for up to 60% of revenue between SLAs and KPIs," says Dave Outterson, Well's controller.

Then there are the rewards. Customers pre-fund points which start as contract liability, and becomes deferred revenue when a member earns it. The revenue is not earned until someone redeems a gift card. QuickBooks could not handle these complex contracts so they sat in spreadsheets instead.

"The only way to stitch it all together was through spreadsheets," Dave says. "QuickBooks wasn't really enabling anything for us. It was just where we put the information after we'd run all our spreadsheet calculations."

Every manual step added a possible point of failure.  "You name it, it happened. Formula errors, ranges wrong, bad reports. Anything that a human can do can happen when you have a manual process for your close."

Dave attacked the problem by rewriting policies and procedures, shortening the close from 3 weeks down to about 10 days. But no matter what, he could not move it shorter than that.

"Without a tool that really enabled it, we were just hitting a hard floor to get any lower."

The Solution: a fleixble contract module capable of absorbing complex contracts

Well spent the better part of a summer evaluating NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and the other standard graduations from QuickBooks.

"Originally DualEntry was brought in as the disruptor, push the incumbents a little bit more, see what they could do," Dave says. "But gradually DualEntry emerged as the solution for us."

Yen Lu, Well's staff accountant, owned the migration process and had some initial doubts it would go smoothly; she planned 2 months of parallel close in both systems and ulimately only needed 1. "DualEntry brought roughly 55,000 records over within a week," she says. "We were able to tie the trial balance between both systems, so we were 100% sure all the data synced accurately."

Well now runs on:

• Revenue contract module absorbing customer terms that change constantly.
• Fixed assets and amortization schedules replacing hand-built Google Sheets.
• Bank agent proposing reconciliation entries instead of making her key them.
• Approval policies and period locking.
• Accounting AI that drafts the journal entries
• Budget and forecast loaded into the ledger, so FP&A pulls actuals versus budget from one view instead of marrying QuickBooks to Google Sheets every month.

Results

"Right now our close is about two days for soft close," Dave says. "That gives us a lot more time than we used to have to do projects, analysis, and additional work."

Yomi Okeowo, Well's financial analyst, watched the same clock from the FP&A side. "Our close process definitely took a lot longer before DualEntry. Like about three weeks." Putting the budget, the forecast, and the actuals in one system, he says, "has definitely sped up our process probably by days."

The reclaimed time went somewhere useful. Well's department leaders now get reporting cut to their own sub-department, on demand, without asking anyone.

"Going back to the way things were before DualEntry would affect our stakeholders the most," Yomi says. "They've become really dependent on having their own personalized reporting. That's just not something we had before with QuickBooks and Google Sheets."

For Dave, the win is not that one big thing got automated. It is that the small things stopped piling up.

"My close is not one big function. It's the death of a thousand cuts in terms of little things. Being able to task an agent on those little things is incredibly helpful."

He runs a two-person accounting department inside a company that reprices its product every few months and has never invoiced the same way twice.

"I don't know what my challenge is going to be next close. What worked in June may not work in July. The ability to just say, hey AI, I want this done, what are your thoughts, is incredibly empowering."

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