About inDrive

inDrive is a global ride-hailing and payments platform operating in more than 50 countries through over 40 legal entities. Its accounting organization reflects that scale: approximately 45 people led by Deepa Damodar, Global Corporate Controller, with regional controllers managing accounting across different currencies, payroll regulations, tax jurisdictions, and financial systems.

As inDrive expanded internationally, its accounting operations became increasingly complex. Each region had its own processes, source systems, and reporting requirements. The monthly close historically took 15 business days, with accountants spending much of that time gathering information, preparing journal entries, and reconciling data across systems.

"We have many legal entities across the globe, different payroll standards, different data sources," says Rafael Silveira, Financial Controller for Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. "To map these to be translated into accounting data in NetSuite itself is very challenging for specific countries and subsidiaries."

The problem: manual journal entries across a complex global operation

In Brazil, one of inDrive’s largest entities, Rafael’s team manages payroll accounting for more than 200 employees and over 900 payroll events each month. These range from salaries and overtime to weekend pay required under local labor laws, shift differentials, and bonuses. Each event must be mapped to the appropriate general ledger account in NetSuite and allocated across multiple financial dimensions, including cost center, business unit, service line, and project.

A restructuring of inDrive’s chart of accounts made the process even more complex, introducing separate GL accounts for each department. “We replicated every single account for every specific department,” Rafael explains. “Wages and salaries for admin, another account for marketing, another for operations support, R&D, and so on. Just for this structure we multiplied the difficulty, because now we have to split these events and costs in additional segments.”

Every month, Rafael’s team had to bring together payroll reports, employee information from Zoho HR, and account mappings from NetSuite. Accountants combined the data in spreadsheets, applied the appropriate accounting rules, and maintained the mappings as employee information changed. “Keeping the maintenance on a monthly basis was quite difficult. Everything was 100% manual.

The same challenges extended across inDrive’s global operations:

• In Dubai, payroll preparation took three to four hours each month. 

• In Cyprus, it required a day of preparation and another day for approvals, while one accountant processed approximately 200 intercompany approvals every quarter.

• VAT roll-forwards across eight regions relied on separate Excel workbooks populated from PDF tax declarations. 

• In Pakistan, sales tax calculations were maintained in a multi-tab spreadsheet, while bonus and leave accruals took a day per region.

inDrive was already using Numeric for close checklists, reconciliations, and flux analysis, but the team encountered performance and usability issues as it worked across a large number of entities. "We have been facing problems with the loading time, many bugs and errors, broken links in the files," Rafael says. "It serves fine as a checklist tool."

While Numeric helped manage close activities, the underlying accounting preparation still required significant manual effort. For Deepa, adding headcount to keep pace with that workload was neither efficient nor sustainable. "I don't really want to keep hiring people because it just makes things manual. It introduces more risk. The more manual, the higher the chance of errors."

The evaluation: trust before scale

inDrive’s finance team was already experimenting with AI. Rafael and his colleagues used Claude for analysis, reporting, and dashboards, while the broader organization explored opportunities to automate accounting workflows.

Preparing journal entries for the general ledger, however, came with stricter requirements. The team needed a solution that could integrate with its existing financial systems, apply accounting rules consistently, and meet the controls required for financial reporting and audit, including SOC 1 and SOC 2 attestations, adherence to IT general controls (ITGCs), and a complete audit trail documenting the agent’s reasoning behind every entry. NetSuite would remain the system of record, with the existing chart of accounts and approval processes intact.

For Rafael, traceability was essential. “In any accounting profession, it must be traceable,” he says. “We must be able to assign reviewers and preparers, share responsibilities, segregate duties. When integrating with another tool it must be traceable as well. We must have a log for everything, a clear path of how data went from point A to point B. That’s the most important for me.”

The team also prioritized flexibility and autonomy. Regional controllers needed to configure workflows, update accounting rules, and accommodate changes in source data without relying on engineering resources or ongoing vendor support. “I really like the possibility to work with the maximum autonomy possible,” Rafael says. “Nothing should depend on someone on your side to support me.”

The executive team wanted confidence that auditors could understand and review work prepared by AI agents. Which is why inDrive began a six-month trial in May 2026 with Maxima, selecting Brazil as the initial pilot because of its accounting complexity. “It was the most complex compared to the others, more employees,” Rafael says. “I volunteered to spearhead and make the first try.”

The solution: bringing accounting context together to automate the work

inDrive began with Brazil’s payroll journal, one of its most complex accounting workflows. The team introduced Maxima in stages, validating the accounting output before expanding the automation and connecting it to NetSuite.“We had three or four waves of implementation, enhancing the process along the way,” Rafael explains. “First, create the journal entry following our map, check the output, then move to another phase. Now we are already using the integration with NetSuite.”

With Maxima, the payroll provider’s data, employee information from Zoho HR, and chart of accounts from NetSuite come together in a single accounting workflow. Instead of manually combining spreadsheets and maintaining mappings, accountants can rely on Max, Maxima’s purpose built accounting agent, to prepare the journal entries using the underlying financial data and inDrive’s established accounting rules. For each payroll event, Max identifies the employee’s financial dimensions, applies the appropriate account mappings, calculates the allocations, and prepares the journal with supporting documentation. Calculations follow defined accounting logic, producing consistent results for the same inputs. Every journal line remains traceable to its source data and the accounting logic applied.

When an event lacks a mapping or an employee’s information has changed, Max flags the issue and asks for clarification rather than proceeding on an assumption. Accountants can review the agent’s work, resolve exceptions, and approve the output before it is posted to NetSuite. “During the process, when the agent is running, there’s some interaction: should I proceed in this direction?” Rafael explains. “It’s a good exercise to also review the information that we gave the agent. It was very easy to understand what was being performed and how to deal with the outputs.”

The Brazil implementation established an approach that inDrive could extend to other countries. Although payroll regulations, reporting formats, and source systems vary by region, the underlying accounting process remains consistent. “The root of the task is the same for every single country,” Rafael says. “There’s a lot of flexibility to adjust the wording to cover a specific template or data source, but the main structure is there.”

Today, inDrive has nine workflows running in Maxima across payroll, tax, and intercompany accounting. Payroll journal automation is live in Brazil, Cyprus, India, and New Ventures, with additional countries planned. The team has also expanded into VAT reconciliation across eight regions, Pakistan sales tax calculations and reclassification entries, intercompany digital marketing expenses, license fees and royalties, and recurring bonus and leave accruals.

As adoption expands, Maxima maintains the controls inDrive established during its evaluation. Agents operate within user permissions, keeping sensitive payroll and bonus information accessible only to authorized team members. Accounting work follows established review and approval processes, with supporting evidence and execution history available for inspection. Maxima also retains prior-period and fiscal calendar context to support recurring workflows.

The impact: more accounting capacity at the same headcount

For Rafael, the most immediate improvement has been the time saved preparing Brazil's monthly payroll journal. A process that previously required approximately two days of manual work now runs in roughly one to one-and-a-half hours. "In general, I'm able now to save two days of work at least," Rafael says. "Maxima now handles much of the recurring preparation that previously occupied the accounting team."

Other regions are seeing similar improvements. In Cyprus, Senior Finance Controller Julia Veretennikova reports saving at least one day each month on payroll preparation. Deepa has seen the benefits across the organization, while recognizing that the overall close depends on progress across every regional team. "It has been a huge time saver for payroll. I know in Brazil it has been a huge time saver as well. It saves a whole day for Julia. But until everyone can close, we don't close."

Beyond time savings, Maxima has made it easier for Rafael to review and reconcile accounting work. With the underlying data, calculations, and supporting evidence available alongside the journal entries, he can investigate discrepancies without reconstructing the process across spreadsheets. “I’m able to perform better reconciliation because everything is in there,” he explains. “If we have any discrepancy, I can do my research very quickly. It’s easier to identify where the error is, whether it was a user mistake uploading the initial data or a wrong prompt.”

For Deepa, these improvements point to a broader opportunity: scaling inDrive's accounting operations through automation. With approximately 45 finance team members supporting operations in more than 50 countries, her priority is to increase the team's capacity without continually adding headcount to manage recurring work.

"I want us to be at 90% automation," Deepa says. "We have enough people now. It's time to start using automation to become more efficient, not people." That ambition is already driving further adoption. With nine workflows live, inDrive has requested another 15 automations, and regional controllers are exploring additional payroll workflows they can configure and manage themselves.