How Indeed manages 800 office leases across 60 countries without adding headcount

Indeed hires fast, scales fast, and signs leases fast. When you are operating in 60 countries and growing headcount by double digits each year, office space decisions move at the speed of the business. For a long time, the accounting team was not keeping up.

Michael Torres joined Indeed's finance organization in early 2023 and found a lease accounting process that depended on a patchwork of regional trackers, forwarded emails, and one consolidated workbook that nobody fully trusted.

"I counted 23 different spreadsheets feeding into that one master file," Torres says. "Every quarter, someone had to spend two weeks manually reconciling the numbers. And every quarter, we found mistakes."

Twenty-three spreadsheets, one broken workbook

The fragmentation was structural. Each regional office maintained its own lease tracker - usually in Excel, sometimes in Google Sheets. Some regions had adopted a lightweight property management tool. Others relied on a shared drive full of scanned PDFs that had not been organized since the original signing dates.

The stakes were higher than the process suggested. With operations spanning the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, Indeed needed to maintain compliance with both ASC 842 and IFRS 16. The spreadsheet approach could barely handle one standard, let alone two. Variable rent clauses in the Tokyo office, index-linked escalations in London, and operating expense pass-throughs in Austin all required different treatment, and the manual process was not equipped to handle the nuance.

When an internal audit flagged $8 million in misclassified right-of-use assets - lease liabilities that had been recorded at incorrect present values because the discount rate assumptions were inconsistent across regions - Torres had the evidence he needed to make the case for a centralized platform.

The 60-day migration

Indeed chose Arvexi after a competitive evaluation that included three other enterprise platforms. The deciding factors were the multi-GAAP engine and the Document Intelligence capability, which could parse Indeed's existing lease documents without requiring the team to manually re-key every contract into a new system.

"We had 800 leases and close to 2,000 associated documents," Torres says. "The idea of manually entering all of that was a non-starter. Arvexi's document extraction changed the math completely."

The migration ran in two phases. Phase one covered the 200 highest-value leases across the US and UK, taking three weeks from data upload to validated journal entries. Phase two rolled out the remaining 600 leases over five weeks, including complex multi-currency agreements in Japan, India, and Germany.

Arvexi configured dual-book accounting so that every lease automatically generates entries under both ASC 842 and IFRS 16. What previously required separate calculations and manual adjustments now happens in a single workflow. The parallel reconciliation step that used to consume three full days each quarter disappeared entirely.

Life after the switch

The impact showed up almost immediately in the quarterly close. The team eliminated roughly 2,400 manual journal entries per quarter. Torres reassigned two full-time employees from data entry to strategic finance work, including lease negotiation analysis and portfolio optimization.

"The review queue is probably the feature that changed our daily routine the most," Torres says. "When a lease gets amended or renewed, it surfaces automatically. We review it, approve the updated treatment, and the entries flow through. There is no chasing people for documents."

The Intelligence module has also become part of the regular workflow. Torres uses it to answer portfolio-level questions that executives bring to his team: What is the total lease liability by region? How much space are we paying for that sits underutilized since the shift to hybrid work? What happens to the balance sheet if we exercise the early termination option on the London headquarters?

"Those questions used to take a week to answer," Torres says. "Now I ask Arvexi and get the answer in 30 seconds. It definitely helps with getting through the end-of-month financial prep much quicker."

The results after one year

Indeed's lease accounting close cycle dropped from nine days to four. The dual-GAAP compliance process that used to require a separate reconciliation step now runs automatically. And the finance team has not added a single headcount to manage the portfolio, despite signing 40 new leases in the past year as the company expanded into new markets.

"The real win is not the time savings," Torres says. "It is that I trust the numbers now. When I sign off on the lease liability, I know it is right. I did not have that confidence before."