Closing Collaboration in a Multinational Accounting Team: How Emma Improved Team Communication and Internal Controls Together with FloQast

Established in Frankfurt, Germany, Emma — The Sleep Company is one of Europe’s fastest-growing consumer goods companies, with a team of over 800 employees and offices in five countries. Since launching in 2013, Emma has experienced tremendous growth and disrupted the mattress industry by developing innovative products that positively impact people’s lives by enhancing their sleep.

“This has huge potential in terms of automation and time savings, especially when it comes to inter-company transactions. We have a lot of transactions we need to compare, and these are hundreds of lines, and, as we all know, manual reconciliations are quite time-consuming. I would say FloQast AutoRec saved us at least five or six hours per month on that process alone.”’

With Emma’s roughly 70-person accounting team spread across five different locations worldwide — Mexico, Shanghai, Frankfurt, Portugal, and Manila — it can be challenging to collaborate across different time zones. With its rapid growth, it was becoming increasingly important to ensure consistent accounting procedures and internal controls across a large, geographically-distributed team.

That need for better communication and visibility led Marcel Poschag, Team Lead Accounting at Emma, to FloQast.

“Initially, we hoped to gain more real-time transparency into our processes, but as we grew more familiar with [FloQast], we found additional modules to be very useful. It has really exceeded my expectations.”

“It’s quite challenging to communicate a big picture and the overall progress in terms of closing financial statements in a big team located in multiple cities all over the globe,” Marcel said. “We all have to be in line and aware of where we are right now and where we need to go next. So we really needed to find a good communication tool that could clearly illustrate where team members were with their tasks without undertaking a labor-intensive implementation process. At the end of the day, we were operating quite efficiently — we just wanted to get better and more efficient.”

Speedy Implementation,
Minimal Training Needed

Initially, the Emma team scheduled two months for implementing FloQast but wound up decreasing that to just four or five weeks.

“The implementation was quite easy and what I really like about FloQast is that it’s very adaptive — it seems like there’s always progress from the side of FloQast in deploying new features or adapting existing ones,” Marcel said.

The expectation when implementing a new system is that there will be a learning curve, but according to Marcel and the team, FloQast required very little training for them to be able to get the most out of the product.

“FloQast is so user-friendly that I never needed any sort of training session,” Marcel admitted, though training sessions are available to all employees.

“I’ve been at Emma for the last six months and using FloQast the last two-to-three months, and the only training I needed was watching Marcel use FloQast for a few minutes,” said Akanksha Singla, Treasury Manager at Emma. “It’s very easy to use, and even newer employees can pick it up quite quickly.”

Automating External Requests
with FloQast ReMind

One of the FloQast solutions Emma uses to improve processes and communication is FloQast ReMind, which automates requests for information to meet the company’s tight closing deadlines.

The team had been scheduling funding requests in Outlook, but it didn’t work well for Emma’s entities. Each month, Akanksha would send 28 different emails, each addressed to separate people, with various templates and attachments. Akanksha now uses FloQast ReMind to segregate requests from each entity and attach different Excel files to those automated emails.

“ReMind makes it super convenient by automatically collecting the data,” Akanksha said. “I basically just have to do it once in the cycle. It’s quite convenient.”

ReMind automatically sends follow-up requests after two days if Akanksha hasn’t received a response, and she can request the data in an Excel format.

“I get the templates in my inbox, and they can be consolidated there as well. That was quite helpful for me and saved me a lot of time by eliminating chasing people,” Akanksha said. “Now, it takes me roughly 30% of the time it would normally take me to do it.”

Microsoft Dynamics Meets FloQast

Alexandra Adler, Accountant at Emma, said she was impressed by how FloQast integrates with Microsoft Dynamics via FloQast Connect, which automatically refreshes data and provides notifications if accounts go out of balance.

“I like that if we book something in Dynamics, it’s automatically reflected in FloQast,” she said. “Then, you have the supporting document, which is also reflected in FloQast, and we can directly compare whether the numbers are the same or if something was changed in Dynamics.”

Alexandra also noted that Microsoft Dynamics feeds the trial balance directly into FloQast, so she doesn’t have to manually upload it. “For me, it is beneficial because the trial balance is sent regularly,” Alexandra said. “In the past, we would have to manually update the trial balance. Now, it’s automatically done at regular intervals, so we know the information is up to date, which is very helpful.”

What’s Your Favorite Feature?

While the consensus was that each team member found tremendous value in using FloQast overall, their favorite features all differed.

For Akanksha, FloQast Close’s visibility into the progress of the monthly close, even though they’re spread across several continents and time zones, is tremendously valuable.

“For the monthly closings, it actually makes it quite transparent to the other team members once we’ve signed off our tasks,” Akanksha said. “They know that these are the tasks which are already taken care of, and what needs to be worked on next, even when tasks are dependent on others.”

For Marcel, FloQast AutoRec is the most valuable because it automates the most tedious parts of the month-end close and lets the team focus on areas that need attention rather than spending time manually matching transactions. “Before, we checked several hundred transactions manually, line by line,” Marcel said. “Now, we only have maybe five or 10 lines that don’t tie out, and we don’t need to check the other lines. It really helps us to allocate our time and resources, which can be quite limited at times, to those focus areas where it has an efficient impact.”