Scaling Financial Operations for Data Center Development: How Stream Data Centers Transformed Draw Packaging with Rabbet

About Stream Data Centers 

Stream Data Centers is the technical real estate affiliate of Stream Realty Partners, a full service commercial real estate investment, development and services company. Since 1999, Stream Data Centers has set new standards for innovation, operational excellence and sustainability in the data center industry. 

Challenge 

Before implementing Rabbet, Stream Data Centers relied on Excel for draw packaging and project financial management. As the number of projects grew, it became clear that this approach wouldn’t scale. 

According to Rosa Arago, Manager of Project Controls, assembling draw packages in Excel was a major challenge. “I remember it being really quite painful,” she said. “The file would get bigger and bigger, and it would get so slow. We used pivot tables, and a single wrong keystroke could cause issues.” 

The team also used to spend time on manual tasks and repetitive work such as opening individual invoices one by one and manually coding data—an approach susceptible to user error that required extra effort to verify accuracy. 

Solution 

Stream Data Centers adopted Rabbet to streamline its draw packaging process and capital planning for its development sites. 

Rabbet brought structure and automation to the draw packaging process. The team now begins by populating the budget and inputting agreements into Rabbet, then applies invoices directly against those agreements. With everything centralized, preparing a draw package is significantly faster and more organized. 

“Adding all the invoices, opening the draw, and then assigning people to approve—that whole process is why we got Rabbet,” said Rosa Arago.

The built-in approval workflow further streamlined collaboration. “The approval process is great—you don’t have to rely on emails. You can just remind people to go in and approve, and you can leave comments directly in Rabbet,” Rosa added. This eliminated reliance on email threads and enabled clear, trackable communication within the platform. 

Rabbet also strengthened the team’s approach to financial planning, enabling more proactive budget management. “We use the projection side to walk forward our estimates, and then we use our budget to see how we're looking,” said Michael Tang, Director of Finance. “If we need to request a capital budget expansion, that’s where we conduct our analysis.” 

Michael also noted that Rabbet supports their core financial workflows: “From a finance perspective, it fulfills our needs for financial analysis—whether we’re doing variance analysis, forecasting, or budgeting.” Job cost breakdowns, which weren’t easily supported in existing systems, are now managed within Rabbet. 

“It’s about getting ahead of costs before they become overruns,” said Michael. “We’re trying to manage everyone’s expectations around where costs are heading — Rabbet gives us the platform to track all that.” 

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