The Problem
Speak is one of the fastest-growing AI-powered language platforms — recently surpassing $100M ARR. To keep pace with the business, its finance team operates intentionally lean, relying on automation and AI to support a global operation with just two experienced team members.
Preparing for Speak’s first financial statement audit with a Big Four audit firm surfaced a familiar challenge: traditional audit workflows are built for large, manual teams — not fast-moving, AI-native companies.
Before Inscope, Kelly knew exactly what the legacy approach looked like from prior roles:
- Weeks of drafting financial statements and technical memos manually
- Multiple Word and Excel versions, each requiring reconciliation
- Formatting and consistency checks that consumed hours
- High likelihood of rework and overlooked tie-outs
- Contractor support often required to bridge bandwidth or technical depth
These were symptoms of a legacy process that hasn’t evolved as quickly as today’s finance teams have. Speak needed a way to run an enterprise-grade audit without slowing down, and without diverting its small-but-capable team away from broader responsibilities.
The solution
Speak adopted Inscope to run its audit in a modern, efficient way — replacing fragmented Word and Excel files with a single workspace for drafting, reviewing, and collaborating with their Big Four audit firm.
Here’s what made the biggest difference:
- Fast, structured onboarding — Inscope set up the initial workbook and PBC list, giving Speak a clean, logical starting point that was easy to roll forward.
- Excel-native workflow — The team drafted and updated statements directly from Excel inside Inscope, eliminating version-control issues entirely.
- AI-generated footnotes (Penny) — Penny produced complete, audit-ready footnotes in minutes, and handled new disclosures as they came up.
- Built-in technical accounting support — Penny helped translate complex guidance into clear, usable drafts — without external experts or additional research cycles.
- Real-time collaboration with the audit firm — Speak and the Big Four auditors worked in one shared space, resolving comments quickly and keeping the audit moving.
Inscope allowed a two-person finance team to prepare enterprise-grade statements without the manual lift, delays, or rework typical of a first-year audit.
Outcome
Inscope enabled Speak’s two-person finance team to complete a first-year Big Four audit quickly, cleanly, and without external technical accounting support.
- Weeks saved — what traditionally takes weeks of drafting, revising, and reconciling was completed in a fraction of the time.
- 20+ technical memos drafted efficiently using Penny’s AI-guided support.
- No version-control issues — all collaboration happened inside a single workspace.
- A cleaner, faster first draft — the team produced an audit-ready package in hours, not days.
- Enterprise-level leverage with a lean team — the finance function operated with the effectiveness of a much larger group.
“Inscope let a two-person team run a Big Four audit without slowing down. What would’ve taken weeks was finished in a fraction of the time.”
— Kelly Larocca, Global Controller, Speak