Customer Stories
Fly Leasing Limited Eliminates Distractions and Improves Efficiency with FloQast
We all know how annoying interruptions can be. In a business setting, however, constant distractions lead to lackluster results and lost productivity.
When Fly Leasing Limited’s accounting team decided to invest in close management software to expedite its month-end close and keep leadership apprised of its progress, it sought out a product that was easy to use, worked with Excel, and would limit unnecessary interruptions.
After some research, FloQast was the best option, according to Dmitry Gladun, Fly Leasing Limited’s Accounting Manager.
“A competing solution we vetted wasn’t as intuitive and it forces their clients to transition out of Excel to their native spreadsheet application,” Gladun said. “We needed to be agile enough to adapt to different transaction structures that we encounter, and the best way to do that was by sticking with Excel.”
FloQast provided Fly Leasing Limited’s accounting department, which has team members in multiple locations, with an added benefit: The close management software eliminated the need for email blasts to share information with the team.
“Prior to FloQast, we were using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of things and manage the close project,” Gladun said. “No matter how many times you ask the team to utilize the Excel spreadsheet, and put in their updates, it never happened. FloQast was the first time that we had real-time visibility into deadlines and projects.”
However, Gladun found himself inundated with requests to update the company’s trial balance, something he had to do manually because of Fly Leasing Limited’s on-site ERP: Oracle Fusion/Oracle HFM. Over time, these distractions started to weigh heavily on him.
An article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that an interruption of just 2.8 seconds caused participants in a study to double their error rate when performing a sequence-based cognitive task. The error rate tripled when the interruption lasted 4.4 seconds.
And a study by a business consulting firm found that workers took, on average, five minutes to refocus and return to their original task after each interruption. Over time, those minutes add up.
“The standard solution from FloQast was to just manually upload a TB from Oracle,” recalled Gladun. “As accountants work on their assigned task, and they make a journal entry, they want to see that refreshed balance. If they weren’t seeing that, they would come ask me to refresh the TB in FloQast.
We tried to set up a schedule, but most of the team would request to see an updated TB, in FloQast, shortly after journal posting, so the manual workaround was definitely not working.”
Eventually, Gladun was able to devise a script on his own to automatically generate the trial balance and update it. Once the FloQast Product team found out, the two sides worked closely on FloQast Connect, a product designed to eliminate the need to manually upload the trial balance for on-premise ERP users by pulling it automatically into cloud storage on a predetermined schedule.
As a result, team members no longer need to ask Gladun to manually upload the trial balance. When asked how FloQast — and FloQast Connect — impacted how he operated on a day-to-day basis, Gladun was emphatic.
“FloQast is so easy to use that our team bought-in very quickly,” he said. “We worked very closely with FloQast on Connect, and it seems like the support team is there 24/7. Currently, we’re able to refresh every 30 minutes, and that means less stress for me and fewer interruptions.”
