Customer Stories
AppFolio Achieves a 5-Day Close with FloQast Close Management
“We’re accountants; we love Excel,” said Megan Sitchter, Assistant Controller at AppFolio, in a statement very few accounting professionals would disagree with. “You’re never going to take Excel away from accountants.”
While most financial professionals’ affinity for spreadsheets ebbs and flows depending on the volume they need to analyze, no one can deny that Excel is the go-to tool in an accountant’s toolbox.
This is something that the FloQast team is deeply aware of. We built our product to be used in conjunction with Excel and your ERP to get the most out of what spreadsheets have to offer, but without the pitfalls that Excel-only teams are prone to encounter.
AppFolio Hits Their Target of a 5-Day Close
When AppFolio IPOed in 2015, they closed the books manually using a process that relied heavily on — unsurprisingly — Excel. While they were at a consistent seven-day soft close, a significant amount of work remained for the team once that soft close was complete.
Ultimately, the team decided that getting to a five-day close would be the best for the organization. To get to that point, though, they would need a new process for closing the books. After opting for FloQast, the team was up and running in just a few days.
According to Accounting Manager Whitney Waples, “Our accountants were able to use it right away. The setup process was easy, and the support team answered our questions quickly.”
Saving Time, Freeing Staff to Focus on Value-Add Projects
By reducing the time to complete the close each month, team members now have bandwidth to focus on more valuable work.
“We have a very tight close, so any time we can save tracking how [the close] is going can then be used to prepare our documents,” said Waples. “For me, the real value is staying at the five-day close,” added Stichter. “For two years we’ve been able to deliver. That’s been huge. Now I have access to a full-time staff the rest of the month to work on value add projects.”
“I can’t imagine being where we are today without FloQast,” she concluded.
The Magic of FloQast is that it compliments Excel
Because FloQast augments Excel — minus the hazards that come with relying solely on localized spreadsheets — teams are able to adapt quicker. The same cannot be said for other close management software, according to Stichter.
“I used a competitor of FloQast in a previous job, and it became a document repository,” she said. “The subledger information wasn’t linking to the trial balance, so it almost became useless. We’re accountants, we love Excel. Being able to link to the end totals to tie back to the GL and integrating with Intacct has been huge because everything is constantly refreshed.”
Being constantly up to date means that AppFolio is consistently audit-ready. Their audit firm concurs.
“We’re with a Big Four audit firm, and they love the documentation in FloQast,” Stichter added. “It’s clear to me that FloQast was made by accountants for accountants. We’ve never had an issue going to our auditors with anything in FloQast.”
