The idea behind DoorDash, the largest food delivery platform in the U.S., started as a class project. The co-founders were students at Stanford who took a joint engineering and business course called “Startup Garage.” It was there that they bonded over their mutual interest in using technology to help local business owners.

After interviewing hundreds of small businesses, they realized food delivery was a common pain point. Using their coding skills to build a prototype, and their own cars, the co-founders were the original ‘dashers’, delivering food across the campus of Stanford. Today, the company supports hundreds of thousands of merchants and millions of customers in more than 500 cities across North America.

Wrangling a mecca of data

As a tech company that focuses on logistics, the accounting team at DoorDash manages what Alex Barr calls the ‘mecca of data’. Barr is Senior Manager for Revenue Data at DoorDash. His team owns the data technologies and financial processes within the company that support financial reporting. “I would say that core accounting, tax and finance are using approximately 1000 workflows within our environment,” says Barr.

Like many accounting teams, DoorDash was dealing with a growing volume and complexity of data combined with pressure to speed up processes. Foundational to everything is meeting the rigorous standards to be SOX compliant.  “Sox compliance is key for an accounting organization, but also it’s the foundation to any good business process,” Barr says.

Accelerating transformation in the cloud

These were all compelling factors in the decision by DoorDash to roll out a cloud strategy that included Alteryx Analytics Cloud. Barr says Alteryx has transformed what used to be complex and time-consuming financial processes with no touch, end-to-end automation.  “We use Alteryx for streamlining tons of different operational processes, from self-service data acquisition, conducting in-depth financial analysis, automating transactions, and ensuring our account reconciliations are automatically prepped and accurate.”

The automated and low-code capabilities of Alteryx enable accountants and data analysts to quickly develop analytic workflows and significantly improve efficiencies. “We’re probably saving 25,000 hours a year and millions in ROI,” says Barr.

The time savings also enable the team to focus on more value-added, strategic tasks. “We can free them up to do things that can help us drive better and more accurate accounting.”

With seamless integration capabilities, DoorDash has also been able to integrate the Alteryx Analytics Cloud platform with their Workato platform, exponentially increasing data management capabilities. “Data can be pushed from Alteryx Analytics Cloud into Workato to do things like creating Jira tickets, creating transactions within our ERP system,” says Barr. This integration has enabled seamless workflow management and increased efficiency in their operations.

While accounting may appear to be a back-end process, Barr and his team know they support the greater mission of DoorDash to service merchants, customers and ‘dashers’. Barr says “it’s not just about accounting, it’s also to doing good business and being responsive to our customer needs.”