Closing in ERPs
Supercharging Your Microsoft ERP With FloQast’s Accounting Workflow Automation
As accounting teams continue to adapt to steadily growing expectations for quicker, more efficient processes and consistently accurate results, leaders need to be able to identify areas that can improve and implement something to do just that.
For teams relying on Microsoft ERPs, those resources are readily available — if you understand what you’re trying to solve. For many Microsoft ERP users, FloQast — working seamlessly with Microsoft 365 — is just that solution, offering leaders greater visibility into their teams’ progress, tools to boost those team members’ day-to-day effectiveness, and the ability to maintain audit readiness through it all, so that no one has to scramble when the auditors kick in the door (in a professional way).
Let’s take a look at how you can supercharge your Microsoft ERP using FloQast.
Transparency Leads to Accountability
It might seem like a different lifetime, but for a long, long time, accounting teams were plagued with a lack of transparency, poor communication, and tribal knowledge. Implementing a cloud-based solution that offers team leaders using Microsoft ERPs insight into progress — or lack thereof — means they can reallocate resources to nip any outstanding/overdue tasks in the bud.
According to Stephen Hayes, Corporate Controller at ZAGG, which uses Microsoft Dynamics, FloQast helped him and his team become more strategic over time.
“FloQast has provided greater visibility for the whole financial team and simplified the reconciliation and approval workstream. We can now pre-handle close deliverables to get ahead of the monthly, quarterly, and annual close curve workstream,” Hayes said. “FloQast aligned well with our supporting file structure, without needing major modifications, and helped stratify reference and delivery of supporting documentation in a simple-to-access way. Centralized views allow us to help identify any outstanding close assignments and the party responsible for their completion.”
Boosting Efficiency, Adding Flexibility
For years, experts predicted a slow, steady march toward a flexible work environment, one in which teams would employ remote, in-office, and hybrid remote-on-site employees. The global pandemic changed that in an instant, forcing teams to adapt rapidly to adapt all their processes so they could be executed by remote teams.
For many teams working with Microsoft ERPs, FloQast proved to be the catalyst for the shift, improving communications between functions and streamlining overall efficiency due to the centralized nature FloQast offers.
FloQast’s integration with Microsoft Teams allows accountants to respond to review notes, request status updates, and even sign off on their tasks directly within Teams. Being the only accounting workflow automation platform to provide a bi-directional integration with Teams, FloQast knows how crucial this capability is for accounting teams working remotely and yet still require effective collaboration across peers and other departments.
As we all probably know, accounting teams need to coordinate checks and balances and document the segregation of responsibilities between different parts of the team. FloQast captures these conversations as crucial supporting evidence for the audit and becomes a part of the conversation with push notifications to Outlook and Teams on tasks due and material out-of-balance conditions.
Audit Ready, Always
For accounting teams, audit season means double the work: looking back on the year that was while continuing to execute their day-to-day responsibilities. FloQast offers users a way to store supporting documentation and provide clear, concise lines of communication to back them up – allowing teams to simply provide their auditors with access to FloQast instead of round after round of PBC requests.
A “set it and forget it audit?” Maybe not, but if you can cut the time required to execute an efficient audit, you can lower costs significantly.
“FloQast has become instrumental in providing the bridge between ZAGG’s internal audit functions and the SEC,” said Hayes. “It provides a critical point of reference, the checks and balances necessary to verify that appropriate internal accounting tasks have been completed and ratified.”
The Bottom Line: FloQast’s Impact on Microsoft ERPs
Boosting team effectiveness, introducing a new level of transparency, and positively impacting the audit experience to reach beyond overall efficiency gains: They can — and often do — mitigate stress and improve employee engagement and retention.
With a Microsoft ERP, Microsoft 365’s suite of tools, and FloQast accounting workflow automation, accounting teams can:
- Deliver greater transparency for better decision making
- Automate mundane, highly-manual tasks
- Ensure optimal collaboration regardless of location
- Reduce audit burden
FloQast has helped hundreds of customers optimize their investment in Microsoft’s Environment for Finance and Accounting operations. Using FloQast, they have reduced manual data manipulation and automated the Financial Close, increased their ability to collaborate on the range of tasks that require cross-team coordination, possess real-time visibility into the Close status, and now have centralized controls and documentation to drive a virtual audit.
