How a biotech accountant closed his month-end in 2 days with Billow
Two weeks of pulling data, chasing variances and assembling the package, every month. Now it's two days of review and sign-off.
Corey Pecoraro
CPA
2 weeks → 2 days
Month-end close, from pulling the data through to sign-off
90%+ less time
Of the month spent on the close, back for analysis and forecasting
0 hours
On data entry, or on rolling Excel files forward by hand
About Corey
“What changed? I stopped spending the first half of every month looking backward. When the close basically runs itself, you get your calendar back. I'm no longer drowning in ledger cleanup. I can actually partner with our research and clinical leads to model runway and optimize our burn.”
Corey Pecoraro, CPA, is an experienced accountant with 10+ years in corporate accounting, a majority of it in biotech. He owns the financial ecosystem end to end: managing the general ledger close, leading FP&A, and overseeing procure-to-pay across every spend-heavy department.
In biotech, finance teams are lean but the spend is exceptionally complex. Clinical trial accruals and R&D expenditures move rapidly, cash burn is under a microscope, and the person closing the books is usually the same person tasked with translating those numbers for executive leadership.
Every month, two weeks disappear into the close
Corey would pull data, reconcile accounts, chase variances, and assemble the close package. It was mostly repetitive, rules-based work that happens the same way every month.
A lagged two-week close meant financial visibility suffered. Variances surfaced long after the cash was spent, forcing leadership to make critical R&D and pipeline decisions using outdated intelligence.
“A 14-day close means two weeks of pure operational drag. Every hour spent manually reconciling clinical trial invoices and chasing down cross-departmental variances was an hour I wasn't spending on dynamic pipeline modeling, cash runway analysis, or true strategic capital allocation.”
Corey tried Claude, but it didn't work as expected
Earlier this year, Corey turned to Claude to help streamline his month-end close.
While powerful as a general AI, using a broad chat interface for complex accounting proved extremely difficult and time-intensive. Without a dedicated support team or finance-built features, bridging the gap was an uphill climb:
Zero native system integrations. Corey's close relies heavily on external systems. Without out-of-the-box connectors, using Claude meant manually exporting reports, reformatting spreadsheets, and pasting data back and forth. Attempting to build an automated workflow actually added to his manual workload.
No hands-on support or setup. Claude gives you a blank text box. Corey had to figure out the prompts, the structure, and the process himself. He wasn't looking for a project. He was looking for the close to get done.
Lack of deep financial context. Without his chart of accounts, his checklist, or his company context, outputs came back generic. In accounting, “mostly right” means checking everything anyway. If you're re-verifying every output, you haven't automated the work.
AI was supposed to save him time, but he spent that time engineering prompts instead.
Instead of an empty prompt box, agents
Billow gives you agents: AI employees purpose-built for finance and accounting teams. Each agent comes pre-trained with specific skills and expertise.
For Corey, that meant selecting a Billow agent that does the month-end close.
“The difference was night and day within ten minutes. I wasn't sitting there trying to teach a generic LLM what an accrual or schedule roll-forward was, or figuring out how to prompt it. The agent already spoke accounting. It just needed to learn our specific business logic.”
Billow learns your close, then runs it
Billow interviews you. Each company handles their month-end close differently. Billow proactively asks you what it needs to understand how your close works.
Billow generates a workflow. Billow maps out your month-end close into a series of steps that the AI agent executes.
Billow runs automatically. With the NetSuite integration connected, Billow can gather the data it needs to run autonomously. It flags anything unusual as it goes, and you can follow along step by step, so you're always confident in what it's doing and can jump in and steer whenever you want.
Billow asks for approval. Billow notifies you when it's done, for approval before uploading to NetSuite.
Integrates with the tools accountants already use
The NetSuite integration is what makes this repeatable. Billow pulls straight from the system of record, so Corey never feeds it data manually. Set it up once and it runs the next month on its own.
“Watching it execute that first run was wild. Tasks that used to take me hours of tedious data pulls and manual Excel roll-forwards were finishing in minutes right in front of me, and with complete accuracy.”
The close stopped being the job
Billow took Corey's month-end close from two weeks to 2 days.
With Billow, Corey was able to remove the mundane, repeatable tasks that usually come with the month-end close. Two weeks of reconciliation and package-building are now compressed into 2 days of review and sign-off.
This means variances surface while they're still fresh, and leadership sees the real financial picture almost in real time.
It also means Corey spends his month on analysis and forecasting instead of data entry. The close stopped being the job and went back to being one part of it.
“Those two weeks aren't lost to administrative overhead anymore. Instead of constantly reacting to last month's numbers, we're making decisions in real time. The close went from an all-consuming operational roadblock to a quick, reliable standard operating procedure.”
