How Energy Transfer absorbed $15B in acquisitions with only 2 new hires

Company overview

Energy Transfer is a United States-based midstream energy company with assets in 44 states and a growing international presence across 26 countries, including Canada, Germany, the Caribbean and more. Its core operations include transportation, storage and terminaling for hydrocarbon products, natural gas, crude oil, natural gas liquids and refined products. Energy Transfer is one of the 50 largest corporations in the US, with an annual revenue of $82.67 billion in 2024.

Business challenges

The company’s automation journey began with a finance function managing high volumes of activity across more than 250 legal entities and 37 business segments. Sabari Swaminathan, Assistant Controller of Corporate Business Systems and Automation, explains that Finance Automation by Redwood was originally brought in to replace Blackline, which had been widely used for balance sheet certification. “Once Redwood went live, the functionality which was used in Blackline was completely stopped. Everything moved to Redwood,” Sabari explains.

Despite absorbing approximately $15 billion in acquisitions since 2022, Sabari has only added “one and a half headcounts — maybe two headcounts, that’s it,” he says.

Solution

Energy Transfer began implementing Finance Automation in late 2020, with production use starting in 2023. The team focused on automating journal entry, task management and balance sheet certification.

Sabari’s team now uses Finance Automation to post close to 3,000 journal entries per month and continues to absorb growing operational scope without creating bottlenecks. Reconciliations that once took up to an hour now take about seven minutes.

Energy Transfer has also implemented Finance Automation to replace GLSU and select Winshuttle functions in journal workflows to consolidate execution into one system while retaining limited use of Winshuttle where needed. “The whole Redwood piece was brought in as a replacement for Blackline,” Sabari confirms.

Capital project settlements are another area where automation has delivered value. Energy Transfer now uses Finance Automation to manage a multi-step regulatory submission process involving construction projects across the US. “We automated that whole thing — fetching data, collation, creating of PDF, generation, the entire end-to-end,” Sabari says. “Now it’s automated, tested, validated.”

Finance Automation’s ability to centralize and surface SOX-relevant data has also streamlined audit workflows and reduced manual effort across Energy Transfer’s departments. “We’ve housed a separate profile for all our internal and external auditors. They don’t even need to go to SAP or identify any journal entries,” Sabari explains. “Everything is right there for them.”

Results

Energy Transfer has replaced fragmented manual work and legacy tools with standardized, automated execution across its core finance activities. By building on Finance Automation’s orchestration and automation capabilities, Sabari’s team has achieved measurable results in efficiency, scalability and control, while supporting ongoing growth without expanding headcount.

These results demonstrate how Energy Transfer is using automation to scale confidently by absorbing acquisitions, streamlining audits and improving process performance without compromising oversight. Automation is no longer a one-time initiative, but a strategic enabler embedded in how the organization operates.

Wisdom for the automation journey

Sabari tracks automation value rigorously by tying every initiative to measurable business outcomes from the start. After taking over the automation program, he implemented a framework where each project is logged with its associated investment, manual effort saved and line of business coverage. “Every project has to have how much money we spend. You know, I put it in a dashboard,” he explains. “So I can show the value we are getting out of it, where the items are, which LOBs, the whole story. Just by looking at the dashboard, we can say what the product is bringing.”

His team continues to explore integrations with platforms like Databricks and is piloting Finance Automation for audit-related control validation. With a strong internal development team and a framework for continuous process review, Energy Transfer treats automation as an embedded capability that can benefit the entire organization — not a one-time project.

Sabari encourages other organizations to avoid measuring automation solely through headcount savings. Instead, he focuses on how automation supports scale, standardization and agility. He also highlights the importance of cross-functional value. Finance Automation, initially deployed within accounting, is now enabling operational use cases and inspiring other Energy Transfer departments to adopt its approach.