Audit Readiness
FloQast, Sage Intacct Set the Stage for Seamless Remote Audits
Audits are challenging enough when teams are hard at work together in the office, but concerns about a remote audit in the midst of a global pandemic really kept accounting and finance leaders up at night.
This was certainly the case for leaders at Code42, a Minnesota-based Insider Risk Management software company, and Stack Overflow, a professional development community for developers. Within a matter of days, both companies went from audit prep to ensuring team members had what they needed to work remotely for the foreseeable future and execute the audit seamlessly.
“What happens if there’s a complex accounting issue, we just adopted ASC 606, and we need to use the whiteboard or show the auditors our laptop or screenshots? How can you do that remotely? That was our issue,” recalled Grant Christianson, Controller at Code42.
As things transpired, both companies found that a combination of Sage Intacct and FloQast allowed their teams to operate as efficiently as if they were together in the office and conduct effective remote audits, as well.
“We had a great experience,” said Andrew Rankin, Stack Overflow’s Financial Controller. “We started the audit in the last week of July and had our finished audit opinion in September. For a first-year audit — let alone a remote audit where the firm had never seen our systems before — that’s a huge accomplishment. A big part of that was the preparation involved, and FloQast played a big part in that. It was a place where we could track what was done versus what still needed to be done and it offered a central place where we could ensure the quality of the audit schedules was up to par.”
As the two businesses reflect on lessons learned in a COVID world, both Christianson and Rankin said that their experience using Sage Intacct and FloQast during the depths of the pandemic — when they were needed most — was eye-opening and even gave them ideas for how to operate as things return to normal.
“As long as we have the internet, we can do everything, basically,” said Christianson. “All our vendor invoices come in electronically, and all our customer invoices go out electronically. It’s just the ease of doing the day-to-day stuff; we’ve really become efficient at it.”
“This [next] audit is going to be a piece of cake for us,” Christianson concluded.
