Lyft cuts financial close in half with Oracle Cloud

Lyft, the transportation network, was busy reimagining the future of transportation. Behind the scenes, though, the company had gone from a high-growth startup to a publicly traded enterprise processing billions of transactions a year—and its finance systems hadn’t kept up.

In all, it was running about 30 such systems, which were siloed, costly to maintain, and inefficient. They didn’t provide the timely information a fast-growing business needs to make decisions.

Lyft wanted one place to look for answers—across finance and operations, on one data model—so that analysts could get clear reporting and dig for information using the latest analytics and visualization tools.

Lyft turned to Oracle for its integrated Oracle Fusion Cloud finance, enterprise performance management, procurement, and risk management applications. It also implemented Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Analytics Cloud, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

For Lyft’s finance team, closing the financial books faster isn’t just an accounting timesaver, but also a means to grow faster by democratizing access to data. “When I get data fast and get it into the hands of my stakeholders, they can really run with business decisions to grow the company, which is our ultimate goal and our North Star,” says Lisa Blackwood-Kapral, Lyft’s chief accounting officer.

The Oracle Cloud applications’ built-in business best practices let Lyft implement them with no customizations, helping the company improve existing processes rather than just automate them. “A successful implementation to me is finding what you could do differently to get the data faster, as opposed to doing it the way you do today,” Blackwood-Kapral says.

Oracle also offered capabilities to help Lyft expand internationally, such as multicurrency, multilingual application services. Having finance, operations, and analytics on one system will ensure that everyone at Lyft knows where to turn for information and insights.

When Lyft implemented the first elements of Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub in four months, it was able to cut—by more than half—the time it takes to close its books on the revenue component of the ledger. Once the company fully implements Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, it expects to cut the time for its full financial close in half, and then in half again after that as it continues to improve its processes.

Partner Deloitte brought a subject matter expert into Lyft for each key business process module—such as procurement, accounts payable, and accounts receivable—to help Lyft get the most value from each one.

Lyft and Deloitte teamed to deliver a solution that is built to help the enterprise evolve and stay ready to navigate disruption. Learn how Deloitte can help your organization make impact that matters.