When Chief Accounting Officer Emily Ho joined Snowflake in 2019, the company was on the brink of extraordinary growth. But going public and reaching a $10 billion company is no mean feat, and with manual systems and processes in play and no automation, the path ahead was complex. This challenge was the catalyst for Snowflake to ensure it had an enterprise-grade platform to drive scalability and compliance.
Laying the foundation for unprecedented growth.
Snowflake’s mission is to be the data platform that breaks down data silos, enabling customers to drive insights and AI innovation. To deliver on that, it is critical to have an agile foundation to meet evolving customer and organizational needs. But with manual processes across the board, and no enterprise grade systems for finance or HR, automation and speed was challenging. The leadership team knew a unified, scalable system was critical for growth and to continue to meet their customers’ needs.
Snowflake deployed Workday Financial Management, Human Capital Management, and Adaptive Planning. "We needed a platform to enable us to easily add new entities, cost centers, automated consolidation logic, and to be auditable and compliant," says Ho.
The move to a single platform for HR and finance provided immediate, tangible benefits. Having all personnel, cost center, location, and cost information flow seamlessly eliminates the need to reconcile conflicting data across different systems, which for a company where personnel cost is a huge part of the P&L, is vital.
Seamless global expansion and acquisition integration.
Since 2019, Snowflake has grown from around eight legal entities to 43 entities today, supporting a global footprint and an employee headcount that has grown from 2,000 employees to 7,000 plus. A crucial measure of success has been the speed of integrating new acquisitions. With Workday, the time to onboard new entities and employees shrank from months to weeks. The single platform allows for the rapid integration of not only newly-acquired entities, but also customer contracts and vendor agreements.
Workday also acts as the single source of truth for people and financial data, helping Snowflake meet global compliance obligations and file hundreds of annual assessments, surveys, tax returns, and financial statements by being able to create the reports they need immediately.
Embracing AI revolution to drive strategic focus.
Ho believes the AI revolution and the emergence of agents for finance and accounting will accelerate finance and accounting capabilities. Ho expects this to drive significant ROI by automating time-consuming “data wrangling” which currently consumes a large portion of her team's resources. By offloading manual tasks, the finance team can focus on strategic, valuable work that directly supports Snowflake's continued expansion.
Workday’s unified platform makes this AI vision possible. With a single system of record, AI agents can execute processes across data silos that would otherwise require manual reconciliation. "Being able to have this system of record and deploy agents that can go across different modules on a single platform will be super powerful,” says Ho.
But one thing is clear, AI will not replace humans but will augment human-specific traits. “While AI can get tasks done, it cannot inspire. It cannot lead. It cannot make decisions that change people's lives."
Recognized as a Fortune Future 50 leader, Snowflake’s future centers on continuing to help customers do more with less and leveraging AI to support their innovation platform enables them to do that.
We want to automate data wrangling so that my finance team can focus on the strategic, valuable work.
Chief Accounting Officer