Accounting
How SAP ERP Users Can Collaborate with FloQast’s Slack & Microsoft Teams Integrations
Because many accounting tasks for businesses require multiple steps and multiple people, communication is absolutely vital. You could have meetings regularly to keep team members up to date on the progress of the accounting project. Boring!
Or you can take advantage of collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Hooray!
FloQast integrates with Slack and Teams, providing tools to easily share data and one place to house written communications for your accounting department.
By taking advantage of the collaboration tools found in Slack and Microsoft Teams and integrating them in FloQast, accountants can perform remote work inside or outside the office because they don’t have to have constant face-to-face meetings.
Using FloQast with Teams and Slack lets accounting teams complete the month-end close in a streamlined and centralized manner.
This type of functionality is unique to FloQast. Accounting workflow automation competitors cannot match the flexibility of FloQast.
Why Is Collaboration Important in Accounting?
Running a month-end close requires endless collaboration among team members.
Because month-end involves a series of complex steps and multiple people trying to work together, constant communication is vital. Members of the accounting team need to know how the close process is progressing and whether others are hitting their deadlines.
Many steps in a month-end close rely on data accumulated and tasks completed in order. It’s like a small chain reaction. The kindling can’t ignite with a spark. And you can’t reconcile accounts receivable until they complete the monthly billing.
Collaboration ensures that team members let everyone know when they complete their assigned steps. To move everything along on time, everyone must know as soon as possible when they can begin working on their part of the chain reaction.
Some reasons for an accounting team to collaborate include the following:
- Managing tasks: Through regular collaboration, team members know when they have deadlines and when they can begin their tasks. They also know who handles each step.
- Sharing data: When you need shared files or data to complete your duties, you can use file sharing through the collaborative process.
- Sharing screens: With collaboration software, team members can share their screens. This is a great way to ask for help with a problem or show the progress you are making with other team members.
- Updating progress: All team members can see upcoming deadlines through the collaboration tool and see how tasks progress.
- Delegating general accounting tasks: When you need to share information with the entire accounting team regarding budgeting, audits, preparing for earnings releases, or managing inventory, collaboration software streamlines the process.
Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, together with FloQast, keep all the information and communication centralized. There means there’s one home for the audit trail instead of documentation spread across email, Zoom meeting transcripts, and numerous checklists.
And finding the information you need later is far easier with collaborative software than through an email or text chain, especially for new users, who may join the process in the middle and not have access to all the history of emails.
Does Slack Integrate With Microsoft Teams?
The real question is: Does Slack play nicely with MS Teams?
As you prepare to take advantage of the FloQast integration with Slack or Teams, you may encounter both collaborative tools. Maybe your finance team uses Slack, but your external auditors or ERP implementation team uses Teams. Trying to force everyone you work with to switch from one to the other may be impractical. The better option is to integrate Slack and Teams.
- Zapier or Mio: Using a third-party collaboration app, such as Zapier or Mio, can make workable connections between Slack and Teams for you. You can then pass direct messages in Slack to Teams and vice versa.
- Use integrations: Slack and Teams work with each other natively in a few different ways. For example, you can activate a feature if you want to join a video call in Teams from inside your Slack interface.
- Bot connections: You can download bots that allow certain types of direct message sharing between Slack and Microsoft Teams. Bots, which are small pieces of code that allow for task automation, have limited capabilities, but you may find a bot that fits your needs perfectly.
Benefits of Using Slack and Microsoft Teams Together
A cross-platform integration between Microsoft Teams and Slack simplifies the team collaboration process. When your accounting team must communicate with an externally based auditing team, the two of you don’t have to use the same tool. Just integrate Slack and Teams to solve the problem with communications.
Copying Slack messages to Teams and vice versa keeps everyone updated and informed about the project. Although it can be a hassle to use another app like Zapier or Mio to complete the migration between Slack and Teams, this often represents the best option for pricing and connectivity.
How Slack Improves FloQast Communications
Slack’s ability to keep teams connected and working in sync is mission-critical for organizations where regular in-person meetings or video conferencing don’t work.
Team members can share important items and discuss topics in somewhat real time in Slack instead of waiting for formal daily or time-consuming weekly meetings.
Slack delivers a private channel workspace interface that informs team members about pertinent discussions. You can have different Slack channels for different parts of the month-end close process, like:
- A/R
- A/P
- Fixed assets
- Debt and long-term liabilities
- Equity
It’s like a filing system, where all the A/R conversations are on one channel and all equity in another–no overlapping and clear information organization.
Team members can then read these messages at a convenient time, allowing them to maintain their focus on tasks rather than interrupting the day for a meeting.
Enabling better collaboration with Slack is especially helpful for a team running a month-end close using FloQast.
Teams who use Slack or a Slackbot (beep, bop, bo, bop ) as a part of FloQast can streamline communication during the close process. This keeps everyone on the same page about who owns a task, what’s finished, and what remains outstanding.
FloQast created the FloQast Slack app that integrates the two tools. This makes FloQast the first software for financial close management to fully integrate with Slack.
This provides several advantages for FloQast customers, including:
- Generate a Slack notification for a FloQast review note directly to the recipient, and they can reply and change the status of the review note from Slack.
- A complete record of review notes and replies is maintained in FloQast for audit trail continuity.
- Receive essential notifications in Slack for late assignments, items ready for review, and out-of-balance notices.
- Query FloQast from Slack.
- Interact with FloQast directly from Slack.
With the FloQast Slack app, accountants can focus on their daily tasks rather than on updating everyone. It makes the invisible visible.
Connect Slack to allow everyone to communicate at a time that’s convenient for them, all without missing any of the vital information.
How Microsoft Teams Works With FloQast
Like Slack, the Teams app allows you to create a group of people to collaborate on a project. And it makes your life easier.
When you are working on the month-end close, collaborating in Microsoft Teams as a group allows everyone involved in the closing process to maintain communication about the process without having to meet face-to-face constantly.
FloQast became the first accounting workflow automation tool to allow direct integrations with Teams. You can respond to review notes and sign off on tasks all directly from Teams.
FloQast uses this one-of-a-kind integration to capture these messages inside FloQast. These messages become the audit trail centralized in FloQast.
With the FloQast integration with Microsoft Teams, the accounting team members can work whenever and wherever they want in a Team’s channel.
You don’t have to have regular physical meetings, Zoom calls, or even Microsoft Teams calls to collaborate and ensure close is staying on schedule. This work-from-anywhere functionality is unmatched by other accounting automation tools.
Specific Benefits for SAP Users
When using FloQast with SAP, your accounting team will be on its way to a faster and smoother month-end close.
With cloud-based integrations for SAP S/4 HANA and ECC, along with cloud storage and collaboration tools like Slack and Teams, FloQast meets accountants where they work. Built by accountants, for accountants, means FloQast products are intuitive and easy to use.
FloQast delivers specific benefits for the close. SAP offers some help in this area, too. However, because FloQast focuses on the month-end close, its advantages are clear. Using FloQast with SAP integration is an everyday use case for accounting teams.
SAP also integrates with Slack and Teams. Through these types of integrations, companies can keep a closer eye on the daily operations that run through the ERP.
As an additional benefit, people in the company can use mobile devices (iOS or Android), desktop computers, and laptops to collaborate by using the Teams and Slack integrations. They aren’t limited to working on a network computer.
These integrations eliminate the need to use separate interfaces for communication regarding SAP tasks. The interfaces work well to push Slack or Teams notifications upon completing certain tasks or documents. If desired, the accounting team can maintain separate Slack or Teams channels for every document running through the SAP interface.
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