Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are navigating a perfect storm: talent shortages, escalating expectations from CEOs and boards, and the friction of global operations. Against this backdrop of complexity, AI has emerged as the essential lever for teams to maintain velocity and accuracy.
Mike Whitmire, CPA (Inactive), FCA, Co-Founder and CEO of the accounting transformation platform FloQast, has seen this evolution from the front lines. With a career spanning audit and private industry accounting for software-as-a-service companies, Mike is intimately familiar with the industry’s systemic bottlenecks.
These challenges were the catalyst for FloQast. The platform initially solved for the month-end close and reconciliations for technology-forward firms. Today, FloQast has scaled to more than 800 employees across multiple global hubs, evolving from a niche tool into a comprehensive accounting transformation platform.
FloQast’s trajectory mirrors the ingenuity of its users. Controllers began leveraging the platform to manage every internal workflow, far beyond the close process. Mike describes this organic shift as customers “hacking” the application to centralise their operations.
“We found that a fifth of our customers had hacked FloQast for at least one non-close workflow,” Mike explains. “So we said, ‘all right, let’s lean into that.’”
This realisation led to the development of FloQast Ops, a solution that allowed teams to formally create and manage specific workflows outside the close process. However, the mission didn’t stop at mere management. By observing how users were utilising Ops to track complex manual tasks, FloQast identified the next frontier: moving from management to automation.
This insight catalysed the creation of FloQast Transform. Building directly on the foundation of the Ops workflow, Transform empowers teams to build and deploy AI Agents that actually execute the tasks within those workflows.
“This is a prime example of our ‘by accountants, for accountants’ philosophy in action,” Mike notes. “We saw our users striving for more control over non-close processes, so we built the management framework. Then, we saw them drowning in the manual steps within those processes, and we knew we could use AI to help automate them. It’s a constant feedback loop that ensures we’re solving real-world friction, not just theoretical problems.”
This evolution from Ops to Transform illustrates FloQast’s commitment to upskilling the profession. By providing the tools to build custom agents, the platform allows accountants to move from being the preparers of data to the architects and reviewers of automated systems.