Highlights:

• Accruals rebuilt in 30–45 minutes, down from 2–3 hours: Brandon hands Ask Double a client's existing reconciliations and it builds the schedule, pulls the starting balance, and rolls it forward.
• Hours back on every client, every month: time spent on flux analysis dropped significantly, and loading a new client's tax IDs and compliance details now takes a single prompt, freeing capacity to take on more work without adding hours.
• Growth without the burnout: the time Ask Double gives back lets Attivo keep scaling beyond its 500 venture-backed clients while maintaining a great work-life balance.

Attivo's story

Attivo Partners is a finance and accounting firm built for founders. Its team of fractional CFOs and accountants take nearly 500 venture-backed startups through the whole arc of company building: from first raise to acquisition or IPO. And in the last 8 years, the firm has grown to close to 200 people.

Brandon Arnold, a senior accounting manager, runs a team of accountants through monthly close, and he has become one of the firm's most fluent users of Double's native AI chat agent, Ask Double.

In the months since Attivo turned on Ask Double and Double's accruals automation, the composition of Brandon’s month-end changed. Accrual setup that used to run 2-3 hours per client now takes 30 to 45 minutes. Flux analysis used to eat several hours each month, with that time having now been cut in half. Loading a new client's details, once a manual slog through folders, is now done with a single prompt that completes 95% of the task. The best part: building this added productivity did not come at the cost of a longer work week.

AI doesn't replace us. It enhances us. It makes us more productive.

Before Double, inefficiencies stacked up

For Brandon's team, one of the heaviest lifts each month was the digging: chasing down what moved in a client’s financials month over month, and why. Explaining P&L variances meant combing transaction detail by hand, and using QuickBooks alone made a slow job slower. 

“QuickBooks isn't exactly quick when it comes to navigation across multiple clients,” Brandon said. A single client's flux analysis could run for hours—built from scratch across a maze of open workbooks and browser tabs, and every client needed one. Multiply that across hundreds of clients, and the result is a serious time sink. 

Trying Ask Double as an AI-forward firm

Attivo does not wait to be sold on new technology. The firm runs Ramp for accounts payable, moved its general ledger onto Rillet, and lets accountants reach for Claude or ChatGPT when it helps their workflow. 

Brandon had used FloQast in a previous role, so when his team at Attivo came to Double, he had a clear basis for comparison. What stood out was the thing previous tools lacked: a real focus on AI. When Ask Double was released, Attivo moved fast, running firm-wide trainings and adopting the conversational agent format across teams. 

“Ask Double has definitely been at the forefront as one of our most useful tools,” he said.

Three jobs Ask Double does every month

• Going deeper on flux. When a variance needs backup, Brandon’s team no longer hunts for it. He asks Double to pull the supporting attachments and documentation straight into the note, so an analysis that used to be built by hand now starts from a question. From the close tab, the team runs the flux against the P&L, sets the threshold each client cares most about, and reviews. 

“Instead of spending hours building it out, you can just fine-tune those and spot-check various items.” 

• Loading a client in one instruction. Onboarding a new client in Double used to mean copying tax IDs, compliance details, and account information out of the client’s Dropbox folder by hand. Brandon pointed Ask Double at the folder instead, and had it populate the properties tab in one pass. The payoff is largest exactly when the pressure is highest, during a staffing change, when a new accountant needs a client's key details in one place and cannot wait a day to get them.
• Rebuilding accruals from history. This is the one that drew a crowd at a company lunch-and-learn, and the one Brandon has replicated since. He hands Ask Double the existing reconciliations for fixed assets and prepaids, and it builds the schedule into Double’s native accruals module, pulling the starting balance for the implementation month and rolling it forward. The old CSV upload method took 2-3 hours per client. Ask Double did it in 30 to 45 minutes. From there the accruals module books the entries in QuickBooks on its own, and a quick export drops them into the reconciliation workbooks Attivo keeps for clients, saving another few hours per month, per client, on work that used to recur forever. Over a year, on a single client, that’s close to a full workweek that stops disappearing into journal entries.

Even the small things compound. Brandon turns client requests into tasks by pasting a Slack message into Ask Double and asking for a recurring task or a one-time checklist item, five to ten minutes at a time, several times a month.

A robotics client, back from the brink

One standout story of Ask Double came from a new client Brandon inherited—a robotics company. The client was walking into an intense audit, their previous accounting manager had checked out, and the books were badly behind, with nothing done for the year. Brandon used Ask Double to stand up the rules and accruals quickly, which freed his senior accountant, already underwater, to work through the remaining reconciliations individually.

“It allows us to close quicker with less of a lift,” Brandon said. Months on, the accruals module still books those entries every close, so a client that was drowning does not fall behind again.

Room to grow without burning out

Attivo has a good problem: it tends to win clients faster than it can hire. In Brandon’s eyes, the hours Double gives back could lead to additional bandwidth to take on another client without burying a team. This, in turn, allows the firm to keep growing without breaking its internal promises of a strong work-life balance. 

Just as important, that extra time buys quality. An extra hour or two per client is room to be strategic, to act as a true partner rather than just reconciling accounts. And it changes what the firm's junior staff spend their days on, providing a path for additional training and upward mobility.

It allows our junior staff to have more time to focus on things that will level them up to achieve their career goals or that next promotion.

What's next

Attivo is not finished. A firm-wide library of shared Ask Double skills is in progress, led by the head of IT, to turn one manager's clever workflow into everyone's default operating system. Brandon has also used Ask Double to build himself a close-progress dashboard for a client's in-house controller, showing tasks completed, percentage done, projected close date, and open reconciliations.

Get curious, then get going

For the many firms that know Ask Double is sitting in their close page and have never opened it, Brandon's advice is simple. “If you're not experimenting with it and asking it questions, you're not going to learn, and you're not going to improve your productivity.”

Start small, ask it what tasks are open, and let the use cases find you. The firms that do the experimenting, in his telling, are the ones that stop leaving productivity and quality on the table.

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