Company News
Seeing The Future Through The Cloud
Our team at FloQast gets pretty excited about every new feature we produce. But there’s a special buzz in the air about our latest addition, called Cloud Connect.
As you may have read in our announcement, Cloud Connect automates the connection between FloQast and any ERP by enabling scheduled uploads of trial balances to the cloud. First for Oracle users, and soon for other ERPs including SAP and Microsoft, Cloud Connect allows accounting teams to perform reconciliations in FloQast with up-to-date data – keeping the process accurate and eliminating costly re-work.
Why the extra bounce in our step? It’s because Cloud Connect represents a significant step in adding further automation to the monthly close process.
Until now, that level of automation in FloQast was limited to our clients using NetSuite or Intacct. Those systems employ APIs – application program interfaces – which allow cloud-based computer systems to share data with one another. ERPs not in the cloud – such as Oracle, SAP and many others – don’t have APIs to automate interactions in the cloud.
Cloud Connect changes that. As our marketing team put it, we’re API-ifying on premise-based ERPs, which don’t operate in the cloud.
How’s that for proof of excitement: we’re making up new terminology!
With Cloud Connect, clients establish a recurring daily schedule for how frequently they wish to update their trial balances – from ERP to cloud storage to FloQast. All hands free and fully automated. Immediately after any trial balance update, any user working on the close in FloQast has the most up-to-date data on his or her screen.
And here’s the kicker: as excited as we are about what Cloud Connect does today, what really gets us going are the possibilities it creates for the future. Free-flowing data enables great software applications, and Cloud Connect is a step toward letting data flow more freely.
As we see it, the future of all business-to-business applications hinges on enabling frictionless data movement between applications via integrations: more of them, doing more things, getting more done, and freeing humans for higher-order analytic tasks. The best business software will support more informed decision-making, made more quickly.
More specifically for accounting applications, and managing the close process, this means creating seamless integration between the ERP, supporting documentation and our FloQast close management solution. Over time, more sources of critical accounting data will enter that ecosystem, all tied together so data can flow easily between them. That’s our focus and vision.
We look forward to sharing the journey with our users at every step along the way, and getting your input on how you’d like to see FloQast evolve.
