How DoorDash transformed their accounting org and bent the cost curve using Klarity

We often ask Gordon Lee, the CAO of DoorDash, to join us on stage at our conferences. There’s never a dull moment when Gordon takes the mic. He has a way of making the challenge of keeping G&A flat as you  grow highly entertaining—and relatable—for accounting leaders.

“Two or three years ago, before there was such a thing as Klarity, we measured based on the number of manual journal entries being automated…”

There was an audible groan from the audience. That kind of manual labor is a drag on the team and adds expense. 

“To automate a journal entry, you either did a system integration in your ERP or an RPA—both required ongoing updates, which could be costly.”

Gordon knew he needed a clearer picture of how his team’s accounting processes actually worked, and where they might find the hidden inefficiencies—without hiring a horde of consultants.

He needed a new tool that had process intelligence, powered by AI.

Enter Klarity.

Klarity made process discovery as simple as recording a video on your phone. Instead of months-long consulting engagements with interviews and flowcharts, teams just screen-recorded themselves doing their actual work or during a Zoom call, hit submit, and received complete documentation five to fifteen minutes later.

Klarity recorded DoorDash’s thousands of accounting processes, tagging every step with an owner—the team in Mexico, India—and calculated each step’s cost. That allowed Gordon to make a data-driven decision about where to automate.

When Gordon wanted to tweak their analysis tool? Rather than waiting months for IT to respond to a ticket, he simply asked the Klarity team and poof! It appeared days later. With all of this added efficiency, Doordash was able to move at startup speed inside a Fortune 500 company.

• 15-Minute SOPs: Teams record Zoom videos of their processes, submit to Klarity, get complete documentation in 15 minutes.
• 3,800+ Process Library: Comprehensive mapping across all DoorDash accounting workflows.
• Easy Prioritization: AI analysis downloaded into spreadsheets showing how long steps took, who owned them, and the potential for automation and ROI.
• Deep Partnership: Direct line to product development for rapid iteration.

When Klarity’s AI produced a spreadsheet of DoorDash’s accounting processes—complete with volumes, cycle times, and active work hours, Gordon could finally see what had always been invisible in his teams’ processes. Bottlenecks. Variations. Wasted time. Each line represented an opportunity to dial up efficiency.

Klarity’s analysis became Gordon’s diagnostic tool, showing where DoorDash’s accounting arteries were clogged. He could see spreadsheets showing which processes offered the biggest time savings and automation opportunities, ranked by ROI.

Better together: Gordon’s quick feedback loop  with Andrew and Nischal (Klarity’s CEO and CTO) turned Klarity into a transformational tool for DoorDash, helping Gordon nail his strategic objectives every quarter. 

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Timeline: January 2022 - present

Partnership Evolution: Klarity started its engagement with the revenue team. But when Gordon met Andrew at a CAO dinner in San Francisco, the relationship deepened into weekly strategy calls and a text thread.

A dedicated AI team for finance: “I have weekly calls with Nischal and am like, ‘Nischal could you change this, this, this.’ My team literally have a list of things every week... can you get a more responsive engineering team for finance? I don’t think so!”

The Transformation: Gordon now tracks team adoption as a key metric: “If the team recognizes that it truly helps their life, they’re not going to say no to that. They only want more of it.”

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• Quantifiable Results: 3,800+ processes documented and analyzed across entire accounting organization
• 300+ transformation requests now properly prioritized with data-driven insights

Cultural Transformation:

Gordon also wants to take care of his team, and Klarity’s efficiencies and automation have helped him do that. When Klarity supported automation of the tedious stuff—the mind-numbing manual entries that nobody enjoys—Gordon’s people suddenly had breathing room. Instead of drowning in data entry, they could focus on the work that actually mattered: figuring out how to make systems run better, spotting patterns in the numbers, and solving problems that required human judgment.

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“Now, with Klarity, I can quantify the impact of each step in a process—how long it actually takes, where the bottlenecks are—and rank automation opportunities by ROI. I have 300 transformation requests, and before, everyone said their step was important. Now I can prove which ones will deliver the most value.”

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