About Guild

Guild is one of the leading workforce development companies in the U.S., helping innovative employers, such as Chipotle, Target, Walgreens, and JPMorgan Chase, turn education and skilling into a strategic talent investment. Guild connects employees with learning, coaching, and pathways into critical roles while equipping employers with the insights to attract, retain, and build an adaptable workforce.

Behind that mission sits a complex accounting environment. Guild operates between employers and a network of more than 70 learning providers, offering more than 2,000 programs, requiring its accounting team to bring together data from multiple sources and reconcile activity accurately each month.

The accounting team is focused on turning that complexity into accurate, timely financial reporting each month, while ensuring a sustainable close process.

For Deborah Touron, Director of Accounting at Guild, the goal was never simply to make the close faster. It was to make it sustainable. “Close is something that has to happen, and I want it to be a blip on the radar. I don’t want it to be something that the team has to recover from. My goal is to deliver our results with accuracy, but without the burden of manual work.”

The challenge: complex accounting trapped in spreadsheets and tribal knowledge

Some of Guild’s most complex accounting workflows required data from multiple systems, significant manual preparation, and specialized process knowledge.

Take internal-use software capitalization. Deborah inherited a workbook combining compensation data, an employee census, and engineering time tracking, all threaded together with lookups, mappings, and overrides. Preparing the number was only part of the job. She still had to check who was on leave, confirm who belonged in the calculation, and this all relied on input from engineering before the entry could be completed.  “There were many variables and checkpoints to analyze as a part of the process, simply isolating them was half the battle”

Similar manual effort went into recurring reconciliations between employer and learning provider activity. These processes were essential to accurate financial reporting, but required hours of focused preparation each month. Around all of this sat FloQast. It helped Guild organize the close. It didn’t prepare the accounting work.

The AI breakthrough, and the limits of DIY

Guild wasn’t waiting for accounting software to catch up. AI had become a company-wide priority, and Deborah’s own breakthrough came while tackling Guild’s Day 5 flux commentary. The existing process was manual and complex, so she spent an hour with a colleague, an AI assistant, and a spreadsheet containing the team’s existing process.

That hour broke down the learning barrier and changed how she thought about the work. Soon, accountants across Guild were building their own AI workflows for repeatable processes and presenting what they had built through an internal AI showcase. “All of a sudden the team was building workflows left and right.”

The experiment proved that AI could meaningfully change accounting work. It also exposed the limits of using standalone AI for an enterprise accounting function. A personal AI workflow could encode an accountant’s instructions. But what happened when that accountant left? Who owned the workflow? Which version had prepared a particular month’s entry? How could a reviewer reconstruct what happened? Where would approvals live? And how would a new employee inherit the process without hunting down someone else’s prompts?

These weren’t edge cases. For accounting, they were requirements.

From personal AI workflows to an agentic system of work

Guild began moving repeatable accounting processes into Maxima, with team members identifying the skills and workflows they wanted to migrate. The distinction quickly became clear.

With standalone AI, an accountant could teach a model how to perform a task. With Maxima, that knowledge could become part of a shared accounting process the organization could run, review, control, and improve over time.  And unlike traditional close management software, Maxima didn’t simply track whether the work had been completed. Max prepared the work itself. Today, that spans several of Guild’s recurring journal entry workflows.

What began as journal entry automation became an end-to-end accounting workflow.“We initially thought about Maxima as JE automation. But when we introduced Max to it, it was like, okay, you can actually get it to do the whole kit and caboodle.”

Just as importantly, Guild’s accountants can own and improve these processes themselves. “Can I do the thing myself, or am I going to have to log customer support hours? It’s built so intuitively that we can. That was huge for me.”  And adoption isn’t being driven by Deborah alone. “My team has said, ‘These are the workflows I want in there.’ They’re the ones closer to the material, and they’re all in it.”

Bringing AI into accounting compromising controls

As Guild expanded its use of AI, Maxima’s controls made it possible to automate workflows that would be difficult to manage through standalone tools:

• Workflow-level permissions keep sensitive data such as payroll restricted while allowing approved processes to become shared organizational workflows.  “This actually opens up an amazing opportunity for processes that were previously very siloed because of the nature of the data.”

•  And every run creates the history accounting needs: what happened, which inputs and logic were used, what changed, and who reviewed and approved the work.

Deborah’s assessment was straightforward: “You’re like an auditor’s dream. Having Max operate inside Maxima’s agentic system of work gives us something a standalone AI tool can’t: permissions, approval workflows, complete audit trails, and visibility into every action taken along the way.”

The impact: more capacity, more review, more analysis

For Deborah, the biggest change isn’t simply that individual workflows run faster. It’s that the accounting team has more room to operate differently as Max takes on more of the recurring preparation behind the close.  Guild’s accountants can spend more time reviewing outputs, investigating changes, improving processes, and partnering with the business. 

Deborah is already seeing that shift herself. Maxima has given her the capacity to oversee procurement and spend management alongside accounting, rather than having the close consume her attention only to begin again the following month.  

The impact is particularly visible in Guild’s most labor-intensive workflows:

• One of Guild’s monthly net-down entries historically required roughly two hours of uninterrupted work. The first time Guild ran that workflow through Maxima, it completed in about 17 minutes, in the background. As Guild expands Maxima across the remaining net-downs, Deborah expects to take roughly a full day of recurring preparation off one accountant’s plate every month.  

• Sabbatical accruals tell a similar story. Because of the preparation involved, Guild historically performed the process quarterly. With Maxima, preparation time has fallen by 80%, giving the team the capacity to review the accrual monthly.

• Internal-use software capitalization, once a 14-tab workbook Deborah assembled herself each quarter, now saves three to four hours per run, with Max combining the source data and surfacing anomalies instead of her chasing them down.

• The smaller recurring accruals add up too. Payroll accruals from Workday, VC bonus accruals, and opex accruals from Zip each save about an hour a month. For opex, Max replaces the manual review of pending bills by identifying what needs to be accrued.

What’s next: putting Guild’s most complex accounting on Max

Today, five or six workflows run through Maxima, but Deborah expects that number to grow substantially.   “I envision that we will have our most complex items in here.”  

The longer-term ambition goes beyond the close. Deborah sees Guild’s accountants spending more time alongside FP&A and key stakeholders across the business, comparing actual performance with budgets, investigating what changed, identifying operational issues, and delivering insights the business can act on.

That’s the shift Guild is beginning to make: from accountants spending their time producing the numbers to accountants having the capacity to understand what the numbers mean and help the business act on them.