Excedr, a life science lab equipment lessor, moved accounting from QuickBooks and spreadsheets onto Rillet, an AI-native ERP, with implementation partner Raiz. Monthly close fell from about ten business days to two. Excedr also cut outsourced accounting spend roughly 75%, gained real-time borrowing base visibility, and prepared for international expansion.
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Lab equipment lessor retools its finance operations on Rillet with Raiz, the start of a company-wide overhaul ahead of international growth.
Excedr, which leases laboratory equipment to life science researchers, has cut its monthly close from about ten business days to two days since moving its accounting onto Rillet, an AI-native ERP, freeing its team to spend more time serving the life science labs it finances. Raiz, which implements AI-native ERP and finance systems for growing companies, ran the project and implemented in a few weeks.
"All of the time savings and cost savings that we accrue gets passed on to our customers, the labs. We really want to give them the best white glove service we can." said Jon Chee, co-founder and CEO of Excedr.
For Chee, every hour spent on back-office operations is attention not spent on the labs Excedr serves. A faster close means less time lost to audit prep, lender reporting, and accounting processes that used to slow customer service down. Chee and his team now put that time into the work customers notice: answering questions sooner, moving leases forward at the pace labs want, and building stronger relationships with the researchers they finance.
This move is part of a larger effort to redefine what an equipment lessor can be: faster, more hands-on, and less buried in back-office process. Many equipment lessors originate a lease and sell it on to someone else. Excedr sources, underwrites, funds and services its own leases through maturity, which keeps its lenders looking closely at its books. Until this year, all of that ran on QuickBooks and spreadsheets, including a lease payment schedule that had grown to about 70 tabs.
He says effective AI adoption is equal parts new software and organizational change. Excedr is doing both. "There's a lot of performative AI out there right now, where companies say they use AI and it kind of just stops there," Chee said. "I wanted an implementation partner like Raiz with deep domain expertise in accounting and finance so that we'd get the results we could ultimately share with our customers."
Raiz brought over all 15 years of Excedr's transaction history and rebuilt the company's lease schedules, fixed asset tracking, revenue recognition and invoicing inside Rillet. Now a signed lease contract generates its own invoices and schedules.
Chee credits Raiz's consultants with decisions an AI tool would have missed, such as how to treat prorated payments on Excedr's lease contracts. "There were decisions Raiz made that I know if I'd plugged it into an AI tool it would have just glossed over," he said. "People take responsibility. Agents don't take responsibility."
Excedr's lenders have told the company its reporting has now become even more granular and actionable. Excedr can also see its borrowing base in real time rather than at month-end, so it can draw on available capital sooner and fund labs' equipment faster. The company has cut its outsourced accounting spend by roughly 75%. Audit prep that used to take Chee about three months of pulls, trial balances and reconciliations is now close to the click of a button, and he expects audits to wrap within one to two weeks of close. Rillet also consolidates Excedr's entities and handles multiple currencies, which Chee said he needed before expanding outside the U.S.
"It would take almost three weeks to close the books. Now we close them in two or three days," Chee said.
"We think of ourselves as business model junkies," said Payton Mills, CEO of Raiz. "Excedr has a super interesting business model, with unique lease structures, a borrowing base and multiple audits. Our team wants to be students of that first, and then bring the systems and the accounting expertise to it."
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About Excedr
Founded in 2011 by Jon Chee and Jeff Totten out of the labs of UC Berkeley, Excedr leases laboratory equipment to life science companies, from two-person startups to global organizations with thousands of employees. Excedr sources, underwrites, funds and services its leases directly, and has completed more than 1,000 lease transactions across all 50 states. Learn more at https://www.excedr.com/
About Raiz
Founded in 2025, Raiz is the first Rillet-dedicated value-added reseller and implementation partner. Raiz delivers implementations in weeks, not months, at a fixed fee, not billable hours. From there, Raiz stays on as a long-term partner, managing the finance tech stack and building AI-driven workflows, agents and custom applications that help finance teams do more with less. Raiz is a Pine Services Group company. Learn more at https://www.raizworks.com/.
Media Contact
Nick McAfee, Excedr, 1 (847) 461-9032, [email protected], excedr.com
Payton Mills, Raiz, [email protected], raizworks.com
SOURCE Excedr
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