Customer Stories
How Demme Learning Saves Days Each Month with FloQast Matching
For all the safeguards businesses put in place to protect them from a myriad of threats, it can be easy to overlook the potential impact a misplaced decimal point or extra digit can have on the company.
Headquartered in Pennsylvania, Demme Learning initially integrated FloQast to improve its month-end close process. After cutting their close dramatically, the company was able to confidently report its financials in record time, but one time-consuming, error-prone task remained: Manually reconciling thousands of transactions each month.
That’s when they learned about a new solution that promised to automate much of the work that took the company’s accounting team several days each month to complete.
After deploying FloQast Matching, Demme Learning was able to eliminate the potential for human error and reallocate the time it spent on reconciliations to more value-added tasks.
Manual processes are a struggle for the accounting team and auditors
With a relatively complicated accounting system in place and thousands of transactions every month, Demme Learning’s account team often struggled to reconcile every transaction.
“We create a journal entry for each sales order. Then we have to make sure there’s a corresponding entry in the deferred revenue account for every shipment going out. It was a very, very manual process, just matching this transaction to that transaction, and there could be thousands of lines in each file,” said Demme Learning Accounting Coordinator Joel Theimer. “It took me a few days each month to get all the way through.”
And while he could budget the time to complete the reconciliations, the potential for errors made Theimer uncomfortable. The mistakes had the potential to compound and result in questions from auditors on individual transactions, as well as end balances.
It’s a match! AI-powered automation accelerates the reconciliation process
Because FloQast Matching runs on a proprietary algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, the system can handle hundreds of thousands of records and identify even complex matches. It can even match transactions when descriptions aren’t identical between the general ledger and the bank statement. When the Demme Learning first tried out FloQast Matching in early-2019, they were able to automatically verify nearly every transaction in a matter of moments, cutting down on days of tedious work.
“When I ran Matching for the first time, I was surprised to find that the tool matched 97 percent for me right away,” said Theimer.
Eliminating human error creates confidence in reconciliations and the month-end close
Removing the human element from end-of-month reconciliations is helping Demme Learning avoid small errors that — over time — have the potential to be substantial.
“The small errors could really balloon up; you end up writing some things off hoping there’s nothing major in there,” said Theimer. “If you’re lucky, it’s close enough to zero that we’re comfortable.”
Now, Theimer has the utmost confidence that it won’t miss anything he might have.
“I’m comfortable that Matching won’t miss a digit. It’s not going to transpose numbers and match something that it shouldn’t, where my eyes just running over a file might,” said Theimer.
FloQast Matching adds days back to the calendar each month for Demme Learning
With the time he had previously allocated for manually matching transactions each month — somewhere between two and three days — Theimer has the bandwidth to inspect financial procedures and overall strategy more closely, which will provide more value for Demme Learning down the road.
“We’re looking more closely at the numbers and being able to do more reporting to management,” said Theimer. “We’re not just reporting the results anymore; now we’re looking deeper into what the results actually mean.”
