Customer Stories
Structuring Tech Stacks To Streamline Accounting Processes: How NEXT Insurance Achieved Accounting Operational Excellence
Every business has a few infamous tasks to wrestle with when the time comes. You know the ones we’re talking about: The recurring responsibilities that consistently eat up your time and drive you crazy.
For NEXT Insurance – an online provider of small business insurance – two of those tasks were the monthly close (we’ve heard that one before) and AP processing.
When you find those tasks that are keeping you up at night, the best thing to do is often to automate them or use the right tools to streamline them and make them accessible. That’s what NEXT did for their AP and monthly close. They added FloQast and Tipalti to their tech stack to help streamline both processes and free their time and energy for other things.
In addition to solving the specific issues NEXT struggled with most, FloQast and Tipalti added the benefit of integrating with NEXT’s chosen ERP system, NetSuite. With FloQast, NEXT cut the monthly close time in half.
“We looked at the close management tools out there, and we liked that FloQast was so much more organized and integrated perfectly with NetSuite,” said Byron Whitman, NEXT’s Corporate Controller, “We can see the balance in NetSuite versus whatever’s in the support file and very easily assign out all the different tasks, whether it’s a checklist item or reconciliation. We can see who’s doing it and who’s reviewing it when they’re expected to have it done.”
When the NEXT accounting team wasn’t wrestling with an extended close, they were pushing way too much paper in too many directions to get invoices approved and paid. The slow, manual process negatively impacted both the team and the company’s vendors. Tipalti was just the thing to help automate AP.
“We liked Tipalti’s interface,” Whitman said. “We liked that it integrates with NetSuite. We liked that the approval process, from the user perspective, was straightforward to approve. So, it was pretty easy to get people to use it.”
That’s the key, after all: finding tools that people will actually use and that make their lives happier and more accessible.
“One of the added benefits is ensuring the tools we use are actually improving the happiness of our team,” Whitman said. “If you have a tool that doesn’t work well, the team isn’t going to be happy about integration efforts and reconciling items that are continuously being investigated. Ultimately, this negatively impacts their efficiency and satisfaction with the organization.”
With the right tech stack in place, NEXT Insurance continues to grow and serve its customers with far fewer headaches.
