Case Study: Energy Transfer achieves end-to-end record-to-report automation — saving 45,000 hours and cutting bank reconciliation time 88% with Redwood Software

Fortune 500 energy company achieves end-to-end R2R automation

Energy Transfer, a Fortune 50 U.S. midstream energy company with $78B revenue, operations across 44 states and 250 legal entities, faced a highly complex finance function: 700 accountants handling 4,000 journal entries, 3,500 month-end tasks and over 10,000 balance sheet certifications per month. Rapid M&A growth and multiple SAP instances left accountants spending about 80% of their time “wrestling with data,” with close cycles typically taking four to eight days.

The company implemented Finance Automation by Redwood (integrated with SAP/S4HANA), running a four-month proof-of-concept across journal entry, task management and balance sheet certification and fully deploying over 18 months. The automation cut 45,000 hours annually, reduced time on 150 monthly bank reconciliations from one hour to seven minutes (an 88% reduction), sped SAP access provisioning from 20 minutes to 10 seconds, retired Blackline and Winshuttle, standardized processes, reduced errors and enabled scaling without proportional headcount increases.

Energy Transfer

Jeff Bankert

Assistant Controller - Accounting Automation