Challenge: Roofstock, a leading real estate investment marketplace, was running 52 entities across 16 institutions and hand-building a 30 to 50 tab close package for every entity every month. Roughly 75 tie-outs were checked cell by cell and 15-20 report re-pull cycles per close.
Solution: Qurrent agents assemble the close package inside the accountants' own Excel workbooks. They pull the reports, build every schedule and workpaper, run the tie-outs, and flag every exception on the exact cell with a proposed fix and a deep link to the underlying ledger transaction.
Results:
~25% of accountant time returned to analysis, tracking to 30%+ as the deployment tunes
Close package fully built and zero-variance on the first business day
12 weeks from kickoff to production
The challenge
Monthly close is unavoidable, recurring, and high-stakes. Accountants spend most of it on mechanics but the trouble is every one can run the "same" close a little differently. That’s when errors cascade across dependent tabs, and the time meant for analysis goes to assembly.
At Roofstock, the math was punishing. Each institutional entity within their organization required a hand-built package of 30 to 50 Excel tabs, roughly 11 reports pulled from the proprietary reporting platform, and around 75 tie-outs verified cell by cell, with 15 to 20 re-pull cycles before every variance closed.
Seven or more accountants ran closes in parallel across 52 entities, and every new institution onboarded meant more accountants to hire, train, and shadow.
Roofstock had already put Qurrent agents into production on its move-out workflow, so the team knew what agents could own end to end.
Since that project, the team had even expanded across other aspects of property management including Maintenance, Turns Management, Leasing Renewals, Applicant Screening, Eviction and Payments, Owner Offboarding, and Vendor Dispatchment Management.
The team saw anywhere from 25 to 30% efficiency gains across these functions, proving Qurrent could optimize manual inefficiencies like these across various functions.
The next step, then, was to apply this approach to revenue-adjacent finance work, where errors have consequences and volume compounds. The monthly close became the proving ground for rolling out agents across finance operations as well.
The solution
All prior automation at Roofstock had been built inside their Property Management Platform. Accounting work, meanwhile, lived entirely inside an Excel workbook, with a Control tab as the interface. This was where the property accountants do their work and therefore, where Agents were built.
The decision came directly from the accountants' feedback.
Encodes the accounting standard once
Chart of accounts, the tab roster for each entity, tolerances, CapEx-versus-repair policy, and per-variance fix playbooks are encoded once and applied on every close. Every entity runs against the same standard, every month.
Prepares the recurring close work
Qurrent agents pull the ~11 reports from the ledger, build every schedule and workpaper, and populate cash reconciliation balances from bank statements before the accountant logs in.
Reconciles and surfaces exceptions
Roughly 75 tie-out rules run on every close. Every break is annotated on the exact cell with a specific proposed fix and a deep link to the underlying ledger transaction.
Documents work and decisions
Every variance carries an evidence trail, and every human action on the Control tab is logged. The workbook and the observability layer together give full traceability.
Carries context forward
Prior-month trial balance rollover, journal entry workpaper carry-forward, and per-institution profiles let the deployment scale from the two institutions live today to the remaining fourteen on the roster.
"A property accountant ran a live July close, one of the more complex ones, and logged in on the first business day to a fully built workpaper. Reports were already pulled, variances were flagged, and there was nothing to set up."
— Roofstock accounting operations
Where Roofstock drew the line
The premise the industry is converging on holds that the accountant applies judgment while software does the mechanics.
Roofstock's version is stricter. Qurrent agents surface each exception with a proposed fix on the exact cell and stop there.
Only property accountants can write a number into the system of record, and the agents run the reconciliation. That division of authority is what let Roofstock's control teams approve the agents for production.
The result
Roofstock's cost of service on the close is down more than 30%, per the company's CEO.
Accountants have recovered roughly 25% of their time, a figure tracking toward 30%+ as the deployment tunes in. That time now goes to reviewing exceptions and applying decisions rather than assembling workbooks.
The full package is built and zero-variance at open on the first business day, and the entire deployment went from kickoff to production in 12 weeks.
What’s next
The institutional month close is one just workflow in the wider gamut of institutional accounting. The Roofstock team’s roadmap points upstream from here, with autonomous reconciliation next, followed by accounts payable, receivables, and procure-to-pay for vendor management, each running on the same encoded standards and evidence trails already proving out in the close.
About
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Roofstock is a leading real estate investment platform that lets individuals and institutions buy, sell, and manage single-family rental properties. Roofstock's mission is to make real estate investing more accessible, transparent, and efficient. Through a tech-powered marketplace and end-to-end management, Roofstock lets investors take part in the rental property market without the usual barriers of geography or operational complexity.
