How Chess.com unified their global finance and gained real-time visibility with Aleph
With Bryce Heinz, CFO at Chess.com
Chess.com is the world’s largest online chess platform, with hundreds of millions of accounts, millions of daily active users, and a globally distributed revenue model. Because Chess.com operates across many geographies, currencies, and product lines (subscriptions, ads, tournaments, coaching, etc.), its finance stack grew increasingly complex.
Challenges before Aleph:
- Fragmented systems: Finance operated across eight different ERPs, forcing the team to manually download and stitch reports together.
- Data inconsistency: Operating globally with multi-currency, multi-platform subscriptions made it hard to create one clean, consistent financial view.
- Manual reporting: Exporting and manipulating reports each month slowed down decision-making and visibility across business units.
- Limited visibility: Budgeting was high-level and resource-intensive, preventing department leaders from accessing granular data or participating effectively.
With Aleph, we've been able to give more leaders across the company visibility into the numbers—empowering them to make better decisions every day and during our annual budgeting process.
The solution and results after Aleph:
Today, Chess.com relies on Aleph as its single source of truth for financial data, reporting, and planning:
- Automated financial reporting: What once took days of manual exports is now fully automated, with real-time syncs from NetSuite feeding directly into dynamic reports and dashboards.
- Consistent global view: Aleph consolidates Chess.com’s multi-currency, multi-platform data into one clean, consistent format, giving every stakeholder clarity and confidence in the numbers.
- Collaborative budgeting: Teams now build and track budgets directly in Google Sheets powered by Aleph, enabling granular, bottom-up planning across business units without finance bottlenecks.
- Faster decision-making: Month-end close is faster, reporting is self-serve, and department leaders have instant visibility into performance—unlocking transparency and better decision-making across the organization.
The manual process of downloading, exporting, and stitching reports together was so painful that we finally said, ‘Let’s stop doing this.’ Aleph lets us do everything we wanted—and more—without forcing it through our ERP.
The Impact
Aleph transformed Chess.com’s finance team from manual report builders to real-time strategic enablers.
- Time saved: Financial reporting that once required hours of exports and stitching is now automated—cutting month-end close and budgeting cycles by days.
- Visibility unlocked: Department leaders now have on-demand access to live financial data, empowering faster, data-driven decisions without waiting on finance.
- Confidence restored: A single, consistent source of truth eliminated version chaos and confusion across teams, improving alignment and trust in the numbers.
To learn more about Chess.com, visit https://chess.com
The Aleph team has gone above and beyond—clearing the bar by a mile. They’ve shown up for us at all hours and treated us the way we’d want to treat ourselves. It’s been a truly great partnership.
The manual process of downloading, exporting, and stitching reports together was so painful that we finally said, ‘Let’s stop doing this.’ Aleph lets us do everything we wanted—and more—without forcing it through our ERP.
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