How Samsara's accountants built their own digital teammates

The manual workload inside a modern accounting team

Samsara is a public company known for its connected operations platform. Behind the business is an accounting team of roughly 15 people responsible for accurate, repeatable financial processes under public-company controls.

A large share of their time was consumed by recurring manual work: logging into the ERP, downloading the same source reports, reshaping data in Excel, building work papers, completing reconciliations, and preparing month-end support. These were not strategically difficult tasks, but they were repetitive, time-consuming, and distributed across multiple accountants.

Every hour a staff accountant spent rebuilding a standard reconciliation was an hour they could not spend asking whether the financials made sense, investigating unexpected balances, partnering with the business, or improving the close. Traditional automation was not a natural fit — Scott's team consists of accountants, not software developers.

Meet Larry, Betty, and Bob

Samsara's first digital teammate was Larry. The accounting team trained Larry to work the same process they did: enter the ERP, download a report, organize and manipulate the data in Excel, complete the reconciliation, and email the finished work papers back to the team.

Larry was soon joined by Betty and Bob. Together, the teammates took on recurring work across fixed assets, corporate bonus work papers, international accounting, month-end reconciliations, allocations, and financial reporting. Samsara has since put 17 accounting use cases into production, with the international accounting team using the system for critical close tasks.

The important change was not simply that a task became faster. The accountants themselves could build and improve the workflows without submitting requirements to engineering or explaining their work to an outside implementation team.

A fixed-asset reconciliation went from five accountants to one finished work paper

One of Larry's first jobs was the fixed-asset reconciliation. Previously, four to five staff accountants each downloaded a version of the same base report, reorganized the data, and developed it into a work paper before completing the final reconciliation.

The team trained Larry to download the report once, manipulate the data into the required format, complete the reconciliation in Excel, and send the finished work papers by email. The workflow took about 45 minutes to build and now saves the team approximately seven to eight hours every month on that task alone.

That example became a model for the rest of the accounting organization: start with one stable, repetitive process; teach the digital teammate the end-to-end procedure; verify the output; then reuse the team's capacity on higher-value finance work.

Built for a controlled public-company environment

For Samsara, speed alone is not enough. Accounting workflows must operate inside a controlled environment, preserve audit evidence, and meet SOX requirements. The team has been moving its NetSuite workflows toward more stable direct connections while maintaining the screenshots and audit trails required for compliance.

That reflects the difference between a lightweight productivity assistant and a digital teammate embedded in a finance function. The system must not merely produce an answer — it must execute the process consistently, inside the ERP and spreadsheets the team already uses, and return a reviewable finished product.

The results

The initial Larry workflow proved that an accountant could build useful automation in less than an hour. The broader rollout has now put 17 recurring use cases into production, giving Samsara a foundation for automating month-end work across its accounting teams.

The larger result is leverage: experienced accountants can spend less time collecting and transforming data and more time interpreting it. Scott sees that as a change in the profession, not simply a faster close. The technology does not replace the accountant's judgment — it creates more room for it.