Google: Speaking Finance's Language Through a Source-to-Pay Transformation

The challenge

Source-to-pay transformations at Google's scale fail for a predictable reason: the platform is the easy part, and the process decisions are not. Finance needed a partner who understood how a global finance organization actually works — approvals, controls, close — and who could translate that into Coupa configuration without a year of discovery.

What we did

DataMap brought its best-practice playbook from hundreds of Coupa source-to-pay projects to the design and delivery, working directly with the finance team in their own terms rather than the platform's. That meant fewer decisions made from scratch, faster convergence on process, and a rollout the finance organization owned.

Results

In the words of Google's Director of Finance, Abby Apter:

"We really couldn't have done our transformation successfully without DataMap. They spoke our language and helped us with their deep knowledge of best practices. It would have taken five times the time and cost in terms of trying to figure it out on our own."

What made the difference

• Best practices, not blank pages. Design decisions started from what works across 500+ S2P projects.
• Finance fluency. The team spoke to finance in finance's language — controls, close, and cost — not in platform jargon.
• Speed as a by-product. Fewer restarts and re-decisions are where the "five times" comes from.