Customer Stories
How Deputy Cut Two Business Days Off Its Close With FloQast
Picture yourself at your desk. It’s 6:30 in the evening on the fourth business day of the month — closing time — and you’re looking through your fourth application, trying to find the actual, real current version of a document.
You couldn’t find it in your inbox’s seven different threads on the same subject. Dropbox was also a bust. Slack seemed promising, but you only found the third-most-recent version of the spreadsheet. Now you’re in Asana, where you find the task…only to realize that no one attached the file to it.
Like many accounting teams, the group at Sydney-based Deputy found themselves in a similar, though less dramatic or chaotic, situation just a few years ago. Shared spreadsheets and siloed task lists, combined with little visibility into team progress, made this monthly mission-critical accounting function a stressful and grueling exercise.
“We were using spreadsheets, Asana, and Slack, along with regular Zoom meetings to discuss our progress, and it was exhausting,” said Financial Controller Jen Tran. “The lines of responsibility weren’t clear, and we had no centralized way to store documentation, notes, and status updates, which was a huge problem with offices spread across the global time zones of Sydney, London, and San Francisco.”
Still, the team was able to stick to a respectable seven-to-eight-day Close — but each month came with last-second reconciliations, revisions, and approvals. Something had to be done.
Upon the recommendation of the company’s ERP, NetSuite, Deputy opted to implement FloQast to streamline its accounting processes and, hopefully, cut its close time.
Stress levels, uncertainty, and incomplete tasks have been reduced for the Deputy team since FloQast went live.
“FloQast has become both a productivity tool and a learning tool for our young accounting team,” said Tran. “I can include notes and explanations within our centralized task list now that everyone can see and read, and we don’t need a Zoom meeting or Slack message to discuss it. We’re moving much faster now and taking advantage of the learning opportunities along the way.”
According to Michael Eves, Senior Director, Finance, FloQast is the clear-cut leader for a rapidly growing, geographically-distributed accounting team like Deputy’s.
“FloQast is more modern, a better tool, and more intuitive than other competitive solutions like Blackline,” Eves said. “And the functionality is more powerful with automatic trial balance updates and review notes for team members, auditors, and anyone else who needs to know the details of specific account balances. We like to add notes throughout the month and raise an issue early so it can be cleared early rather than wait until the month’s end.”
