How Roofstock unified accounting automation with Maxima

About

Roofstock is one of the largest real estate investment platforms in the United States, operating across short-term rentals, property management, and direct property ownership. Following its merger with Mynd in 2025, the company inherited more than new revenue streams and teams. It inherited overlapping workflows, duplicated systems, and the challenge of bringing two accounting organizations together under a single corporate close.

For Neil Black, Assistant Controller at Roofstock, the operational reality became obvious almost immediately. The accounting team was running highly manual workflows across spreadsheets, Google Docs, and disconnected systems while already operating under tight resource constraints.

“We’re doing a lot of things very manually and old school here,” Neil says. “We’re very burdened by that because we’re constrained on resources. The obvious move was to find efficiencies.”

Challenge

At many companies, growth adds accounting work incrementally. At Roofstock, it multiplied complexity.

The team closes across roughly 50 legal entities, four to five ERPs, and more than 50 bank accounts. Real estate ownership structures and regulatory requirements meant every new business unit often introduced entirely new systems, workflows, entities, and reporting formats. The work did not simply increase. It compounded.

“Almost none of these systems are connected to NetSuite,” Neil explains. “They almost all need a manual journal entry or data dump to bring the data over. The most time-consuming part of our close is the people manipulating that data to bring it into NetSuite.”

Take payroll accounting as an example. Every month, team members had to pull raw files from ADP, perform lookups to enrich records, build pivot tables, map departments and business units, reformat files, and manually prepare entries from scratch for NetSuite imports. Multiply that across the long list of manual entries the team posts each month, many of them sitting on top of an internally developed property accounting system whose reports come out, as Neil puts it, “in a pretty bad format,” because backend engineering investments historically prioritized customer-facing products.

The coordination layer around close was equally fragmented. Close tasks lived inside Google Docs. Reconciliations sat in spreadsheets. Flux reporting required rebuilding views manually every cycle. There was no centralized system to understand what was complete, what was delayed, or what still required attention.

Meanwhile, the team itself remained stretched thin. “Every day there’s 15 to 20% of tasks I know I’m not going to get to because I just don’t have the resources,” Neil says. “I need to know what is not getting done.”

Evaluation

Roofstock evaluated platforms including BlackLine and FloQast. Both offered familiar capabilities such as checklists, reconciliations, and flux workflows. But Neil was not looking for another coordination system. He wanted a platform that could automate the preparation work itself.

Maxima offered a different approach. Instead of stitching together point workflows, it provided a unified platform spanning journal entry automation, transaction matching, account reconciliations, flux analysis, and close management. More importantly, the AI felt purpose-built for accounting.

“The AI capabilities on Maxima definitely set Maxima apart,” Neil says. “It seemed more robust, more out of the box and flexible.”

Solution

Rather than attempt a large transformation all at once, Neil focused on foundational workflows first. “You’ve got to walk, jog before you can run,” he says. “Fix the foundational things before we get to the fancy stuff.”

Close Checklist

The team migrated their Google Doc checklist into Maxima first, building multiple checklists across different parts of the business that all roll up into a single corporate close. Daily analytics now provide visibility into expected versus actual progress against close milestones, replacing the hand-managed coordination that had been consuming Neil’s review time.

“I look at the analytics every day. It tells me the expected prepared and how we’re trending. That’s really helpful for managing the close.”

Flux Analysis

Flux analysis followed next, running on Maxima’s Flux Report Builder. With NetSuite connected directly into Maxima, draft analyses are populated automatically as transactions posted rather than requiring manual exports and rebuilds. Work that previously took about 30 minutes every time the report was refreshed, often multiple times throughout the close cycle, became a push-button workflow.

Account Reconciliations

Account reconciliations entered rollout ahead of audit, with the goal of bringing 100% of balance sheet accounts into Maxima over time. Starting with a quarterly review cadence and building toward monthly reviews, the team began replacing spreadsheet-driven processes with a standardized workflow that will improve consistency, accountability, and visibility as adoption expands after audit.

Journal Entry Automation

Beginning with the most manual and time-consuming workflows, Neil started with cash journal entries. Native integrations with JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, ADP, and NetSuite laid the foundation for exception-based workflows, with Neil personally validating outputs before expanding automation more broadly.

“I want to do that for as many, if not all, of our manual journal entries,” Neil says. “Then my people don’t have to spend their time doing manual work. They can be doing analytical work.” As journal automation expands across additional workflows, Roofstock expects to remove an additional two business days from the close.

Impact

Four Maxima products are now live or actively rolling out, and the impact is already visible across the close:

• Flux moved from a manual rebuild process to push-button generation. Reviewers no longer wait for preparers to complete entire workstreams before beginning analysis.

• The close checklist, once managed through Google Docs, now provides daily visibility into expected progress, blockers, and completion status. Visibility that once required individual follow-ups now exists in one place.

• Account reconciliations are also creating a level of completeness the team never had previously, providing a centralized view into what is reconciled, what remains outstanding, and what still requires work.

• Finance reviews now happen continuously as sections become available, and the team closes within 24 hours of soft close, down from 72.

Looking ahead, Neil wants to automate as much manual work as possible, surface the supporting evidence, and give his team more time for the analysis that actually moves the business forward. As part of his long-term vision, cash enters the system, gets matched automatically, flows into reconciliations, updates checklist completion, and progresses through the close without manual intervention. 

With Maxima’s unified platform, he already sees that vision beginning to come to life.