Lookout serves a wide array of customers, from individual users to large global enterprises and government organizations. It’s a fast-growth company, scaling quickly. Internal resources are precious, and often constrained. Simultaneously, customer demand grows — as does the strain on the company’s revenue accounting team. Efficiency is key.

With Klarity in place, Lookout has seen month-long review cycles drop by 75% to a week by eliminating the most repetitive aspects of contract review entirely, while simultaneously streamlining the processes that do require human involvement. Today, Lookout’s revenue accounting team is able to focus its effort and energy on far more valuable technical accounting challenges.

The Challenge: Employee burnout

Lookout came to the Klarity team with two related problems. First, contract review inline with ASC 606 standards is a time consuming, labor-intensive task that took up a disproportionate amount of time for Lookout’s hard-working revenue accounting team. Second, the company’s financial leadership needed to find a way to focus more of its team’s time on technical accounting — strategic, value-added initiatives that allow for ongoing innovation and growth. To do so required cutting way back on the administrative aspects of contract review, like manually entering start and end dates.

The issues Lookout’s revenue accounting team faced on a daily basis are common among high-growth companies at their stage and scale. Across every industry, expensive teams of highly trained accounting professionals spend countless hours completing a mundane, repetitive task. As companies scale, they feel the squeeze of constrained resources and face the very real prospect of employee burnout.

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The Solution: Automatiton of mundane manual work

Lookout’s Corporate Controller, Yunyu Chen, is a big proponent of automation. She believes that mundane manual work, in particular, should be automated wherever possible. During her first year at Lookout, she and her entire team had to review hundreds of contracts manually to implement ASC 606. She knew there simply had to be a better way. After a bit of research, she discovered Klarity.

Since deploying Klarity, Lookout has seen improvements in efficiency that allow the accounting team to focus on the technical aspects of contract review and eliminate the administrative aspects entirely. Klarity’s automation and Lookout’s forward-thinking mindset are a perfect match.

In addition to eliminating the most repetitive parts of contract review, Klarity has made it easier on Lookout’s revenue accountants when they do need to get hands-on. It has also provided a secure place to store revenue-specific contracts and related documents.

The Results

“Klarity provides an excellent interface within the contract review process, so when a human does need to get involved it’s much easier and more intuitive. On the left side is your checklist, on the right your contract. Key words and phrases are highlighted, it’s incredibly user-friendly,” said Chen

“Before we implemented Klarity, we didn’t have an accounting-specific tool to store our revenue contracts,” she continued. “We shared a contract storage tool with other departments that wasn’t built for accounting or financial use. Klarity solved that problem, too.”