AmeriHome Cuts Hours off Their Close and Gets Audit Ready with FloQast

At AmeriHome Mortgage, the bulk of their loans close at month-end, and along with frequent audit requests common in the industry, the accounting team has their hands full at month-end crunch time.

In addition to keeping up with all those audit requests, Accounting Manager, Kimber McLaughlin also wanted to cut close times and improve understanding and communication with better flux analysis.

After implementing FloQast, the team was able to cut its close from 15 days to around nine, while gaining tangible insights into the company’s financial health thanks to FloQast Variance Analysis. Not only did this help the team work more efficiently — but it also helped them communicate more accurate financials to management on a consistent basis.

Transforming the Month-End Close

Wanting to cut down the monthly close isn’t exactly uncommon, but for AmeriHome, transitioning from a highly-manual, time-consuming process was a top priority. One of the team’s biggest hang-ups with the monthly close was the sheer volume of reconciliations that needed to be handled. That changed once the company implemented FloQast AutoRec.

“Before, I would manually go through and match all the debits and credits on a certain transaction number, and then cancel those out to see what was left,” said McLaughlin. “Now, I can just import two different files and it matches almost everything on the first go.”

According to McLaughlin, AutoRec’s impact has dramatically impacted the team.

“One of my coworkers has a reconciliation which has almost 100,000 transactions,” said McLaughlin. “Using AutoRec has saved her a ton of time; it matches thousands and thousands of records. The time-saving is kind of ridiculous.”

Flux for the Job You Want

Flux analysis offers insights to help make those strategic decisions, but for most busy accounting teams, there simply isn’t enough time to get to the flux each month.

What did flux look like for AmeriHome before?

“We would run reports out of Intacct, export into Excel, put notes on there, and have links in there to various recs or supporting documents,” said McLaughlin, detailing the tedious process. “Running the reports, having to export, and keep repeating was a challenge. Depending on the month, we’d have to do this pretty often — especially for quarter-end or year-end. It was just too time-consuming.”

Having relied on Flux for some time now, McLaughlin admitted she was still quite pleased with having a centralized location for all things flux has had on her team.

“It’s definitely a time-saver,” she said. “Everyone knows exactly where it is. It’s easy to get to. If you have to work from home, it’s cloud-based, so it’s easy to sign into, which is nice. I like being able to put all my explanations in there so my manager can just look in FloQast where he already is anyway, and then see the explanations.”

Peace of Mind at Audit Time

Those who’ve gone through them can attest: There’s nothing fun about the audit. As it turned out, FloQast was able to make a major impact on that.

“With FloQast, we can provide auditors with a list of all signed-off recs and handle them in just a few seconds, rather than having to send over individual scans.”

“You can easily create a PDF or export it to give to our auditors, which is very convenient. I know that we have the proper organization that I can actually go home,” said McLaughlin.

Reflecting on all FloQast has brought to her and her team, McLaughlin didn’t mince words when asked what she would do without FloQast.

“I don’t even want to think about that,” she said. “FloQast seems to truly understand what the accounting team needs. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night thinking,’Oh no, did we forget x,y,z?’ “I believe FloQast is just amazing,” she said. “I’d recommend FloQast 100%. Everything is so much quicker and easier. I even wear my FloQast shirt all the time.”