Customer Stories
“…Per My Last Message…” the Quest To Streamline Requests for Information
Crossing something off your to-do list only helps if it stays off the list. If you carry it around with you, knowing it could come back soon, it can eat up your time and chew on your peace of mind. Unfortunately, as an accountant, these back-of-the-mind tasks can be too familiar.
Accounting teams handle a lot of data, and that information has to come from somewhere — usually another department within the company. Lots of information means lots of information requests and a lot of reminders if those requests are delayed. In fact, if you’ve ever been asked what you do for a living and replied, “Send emails,” you might be an accountant. If your team is larger or distributed — and what team isn’t in this pre/post/present pandemic limbo? — it can lead to even more requests and more reminders.
PulteGroup’s 80-plus-person accounting team serves more than 240 employees across 28 different divisions. That’s a lot of ground to cover when you need to gather information. “Every week, we have to submit this cash flow to our treasury team, which means we have to request [information] from our 28 different divisions several times a month. The divisions’ responses were very sporadic and created a lot of extra work for everyone,” said Geena Lewis, Manager — NSS Accounting Services Group PulteGroup.
To free up her team to focus on more important things, Geena implemented FloQast ReMind, a request management workflow, to streamline and automate the request process. It eliminated the need to manually send reminders and constantly follow up to see what’s been submitted and outstanding. And for a big team like Geena’s, that kind of automation is, well…outstanding!
“With ReMind, the mass collection of the responses is key. The templates allow you to capture whatever additional data you need. The fact that it puts all the data into one sheet saves so much time,” said Geena.
While FloQast Close consolidates and streamlines the monthly close, FloQast ReMind does the same for information requests both in and outside of the close process. It can be set to send automated requests for anything you need, with built-in response tracking and automatic reminders if a response is late. Pulling the data into a central sheet makes it easy to see exactly what you need when you need it.
With FloQast ReMind, Geena and the PulteGroup team can finally close the loop on their information requests and close the books a little faster. “I would definitely recommend ReMind,” she said. “There’s nothing worse than sending requests and knowing that the thing is still on your to-do list because you have to make sure you come back to it. The ability to set it and let the tool itself remind the people and gather those responses offers peace of mind, and who wouldn’t want it?”
