Between May and July of 2019, Ernst & Young sought out Highstreet to perform the Accounting Hub implementation work for Lyft. This opportunity began the largest implementation of Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud Service ever done. For Lyft’s US and Canadian operations, not only was this project the largest of its kind ever, but in addition it needed to be finished in a record-breaking five months—which would be four months sooner than Oracle’s most optimistic estimate of nine months. The project was to develop and implement the accounting rules necessary to create detailed subledger journal entries for all of Lyft’s primary business activities in the US and Canada as well as various operation reports.
With 10 million rides provided every single day, Lyft is the second largest Ride Share service in the world that is helping to connect riders with drivers. This San Francisco based company, started in 2012, provides all kinds of transportation—not merely your traditional car ride service. Lyft’s mobile app can connect you to motorized scooters, bicycle-sharing, and even a food delivery system. Each of Lyft’s 10 million daily rides comes with many subledger journal entries, adding up to about 50 million lines every single day. With the need to move beyond their home-grown subledger system, and with a hard implementation date of 1/1/2020, this AHCS implementation was not a small project. They needed a commercial subledger system that:
- Improved Auditability and reconcilability
- Centralized control
- Improved month–end close
- Enhanced drill-down revenue analytics
- Improved financial analysis
The original scope was to create rules for 85 different transactions in 7 Event types, however, as of today rules for over 700 different transactions in 15 Event Types have been developed. According to Oracle, not only is Lyft now their largest live AHCS customer, but Lyft’s five-month AHCS implementation was the fastest one done yet. With estimates ranging from nine to fifteen months for most implementations, Highstreet exceeded all of those estimates on implementation because of an exceptionally experienced team of dedicated individuals. Highstreet’s implementation team also set a new performance benchmark for AHCS during UAT testing when they successfully processed over 20 million events per hour during a sustained test of 160 million events. This generated over 1.5 billion subledger journal lines.
“We have already drastically increased our efficiency from January (>20 days) to March (6 days)!”
– Lyft Representative
Once the Oracle AHCS interfaced to NetSuite was implemented, Lyft saw the following benefits:
- Lyft was able to close their first quarter on the new system in six days versus weeks or more.
- An improvement in the data governance and data quality issues across different data domains and functional groups.
- The optimizing of compliance, processes, and controls while even capturing business value from ever-shifting financial reporting.
- A financial system that supports changing financial reporting needs as the business grows while allowing close reports to ultimately be generated faster, more accurately, and with less manual work.
“… Oracle told Lyft they thought it would take at least nine months to implement, but because the Highstreet team had experience with multiple on-premises Accounting Hub implementations and experience functionally and technically with Oracle Cloud ERP Financials implementations, we were able to leverage these experiences to successfully execute the Lyft implementation.”
— Sean McGuire Highstreet VP, Oracle Practice
Completing challenging and ground-breaking implementations is something Highstreet is able to do because of our experience, expertise, proprietary technology and the business processes we have developed to make implementations like Lyft’s easier. If you are interested in seeing other ways that Highstreet is revolutionizing the new standard, check out our recent one-month SFP Implementation for the American University of Antigua.
