Faster, Simpler Accounting: GWI’s Automation Journey

GWI is a global consumer research platform. It provides instant access to data which represents the views, behaviours, and interests of 3 billion consumers in over 50 markets. Founded in 2009, the company now has over 500 employees across its 5 offices in London, New York, Prague, Athens, and Singapore.

That growth, and the company’s expanding client base, added to GWI’s monthly and annual accounting challenges, and prompted the finance team to begin a process of digital transformation. In order to keep up with an evolving professional environment, GWI needed an accounting platform that delivered the same level of process functionality while streamlining and smoothing complex workflows.

“Our Close was pretty manual before. One of our key team objectives has been to reduce month-end Close working days, so we were searching for different ways to automate.” 

– Emmy Gaulter, Senior Finance Manager

Before FloQast

Prior to FloQast, GWI relied on a manual system to manage its books. That system required team members to create and update spreadsheet documents for each new accounting period, and communicate via email to facilitate collaboration and sign-off. As the company experienced commercial growth, its financial workflows scaled and became more complex, making critical accounting tasks more time-consuming and prone to delays, and putting its 15-person core finance team under increasing pressure. 

GWI’s Senior Finance Manager Emmy Gaulter highlighted the complexity of the business’s Close as one of the key challenges for its accountants, not least because of the delays that changes to monthly figures would cause:

“There were lots of working papers and different team members working on different reconciliations. Each time an update was needed, I needed to manually re-run a trial balance to confirm the balances were correct before submitting to the Head of Finance. It could be very time consuming, especially on month end deadline day” 

Collaboration was also challenging under that manual system, with the Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable teams communicating corrections and revisions to working documents over email. That approach could lead to long email-based discussions, making it more difficult for team members to retrieve important information. 

GWI initially wanted to find software tools to address its manual Close pain points, but subsequently realised that a comprehensive digital transformation would be more beneficial – and so decided to automate as much as possible with a Close management solution. The finance team set a specific goal of reducing its monthly Close completion time, and began to research available platforms in order to gain a clear understanding of what would be possible with software integration.

“I don’t think at the time we realised how beneficial automation would be, until we went through the details with FloQast.” 

– Emmy Gaulter, Senior Finance Manager

Implementing FloQast 

In a crowded market, FloQast stood out to GWI thanks to its simplicity and overall functionality, but Emmy also noted that the support the FloQast team provided was critical to GWI’s decision to opt for the platform – and a factor that made the transition process “super smooth”. 

Emmy led the GWI FloQast implementation over Q2 and Q3 of 2023. GWI initially rolled-out FloQast’s Close Management solution with one entity as a test-run, and then integrated the remaining entities the next period. 

With FloQast Close Management up and running, GWI integrated more efficiency tools over the following months, including the amortisation and auto-reconciliations features. The accounting team has since brought more working papers and amortisation reconciliation for smaller entities into the new system as part of its goal of automating as much as possible. Emmy highlighted the impact of FloQast’s AutoRec feature on bank reconciliations, noting that the team can now update monthly figures in seconds without having to re-run the entire process. 

“It just looked very user-friendly. It looked like exactly what we needed. We really liked the team as well. You gave us more time. Those were the main reasons we decided to go for FloQast.” 

– Emmy Gaulter, Senior Finance Manager

Outside of the Close, the GWI team is using FloQast to streamline the finance function in other ways, including creating checklists, facilitating collaboration between team members, integrating instant messaging, and increasing visibility of, and accountability for, tasks and workflows. 

GWI’s audit process has also benefited from FloQast implementation, with the elimination of a manual email-based approval process in favour of an automated preparer-reviewer audit control function. FloQast also enables GWI accountants to download full email reports to show to auditors, and to make specialised audit checklists. 

An Ongoing Process

The simplicity of FloQast tools has made the platform integral to GWI’s daily accounting, and has delivered the results that the team was looking for – not least reducing Close completion time from 10 to 8 days. Reflecting on that progress, Emmy emphasised the impact of FloQast’s client support in the success of the digital transformation: “The training that FloQast gives is very clear,” Emmy said. “You have online resources. Our consultant was great. You can always jump on a call.”

“I’ve implemented quite a few systems in previous roles, and FloQast is probably the easiest integration I’ve ever done. After training, I was able to roll it out myself to the wider finance team.” 

– Emmy Gaulter, Senior Finance Manager

GWI’s automation journey is ongoing and includes plans to incorporate more accounting workflows and achieve an even shorter Close. Having transformed so much of the day-to-day finance function, Emmy and her team are keen to push the FloQast platform further: “From junior members of staff to the VP of Finance, everyone can see the benefits. We’re quite interested to see what FloQast has in store, and find out if there are new features coming out that can help us.”