How FloQast Helped Bluecore Cut Its Close and Automate Highly-Manual Tasks

As companies grow, adding to the team and bringing on new clients, the accounting process is often one of the last things to get updated. In other words, you may have outgrown your approach to accounting, but keep slogging on without realizing the negative impact. 

The Situation 

Bluecore’s retail marketing technology helps some of the biggest D2C brands integrate their marketing across platforms. Unfortunately, the company’s finance department was struggling to stay integrated. With hundreds of employees in different locations, efficiently managing the accounting process wasn’t as easy as it may sound. 

The Struggle

The Bluecore team was spending about 25 days on the Close each month. And if you’re thinking that sounds like they were in closing mode almost all the time, you’d be right.  

“When you have a team in various locations, sometimes you don’t know what other people are working on,” says Lalwani. “So for me, as the one organizing the workload, sometimes I forget this person is doing this, this person’s doing that.” 

Visibility wasn’t just a concern for Rohit. Lack of transparency team-wide created roadblocks that, oftentimes, team members would encounter out of nowhere. Additionally, manually closing the books puts teams at risk for errors, and the constant double-checking and running down questions adds days to the process, even if it ends up being unnecessary. 

Accounting all comes back to the docs. Whether you’re closing the books or just making day-to-day entries, you need to have something to work with. For Bluecore, these numbers were often a big part of the delay. Getting all the relevant bills, invoices, and other documentation for the period in a timely manner would make accounting much easier, but that’s not what was happening here. The delays piled up, and the month dragged on well into the next. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZxJ7P8GrhA&t=11s

The Full Story

Fortunately, Rohit and the team found a solution to these problems that didn’t take long to implement and didn’t cause any new problems of its own. 

“Shortening your Close doesn’t mean working more hours — or harder. A big part of this is organization. That’s where FloQast comes in. Now, guess what? You have your to-do list. Go ahead and start working on it. Then you have tools like AutoRec. You have tools like ReMind. These are tools that are helping us achieve a shorter close and allow people to work on other things.”

To see how Bluecore:

• Slashed their Close from 25 days down to just 10!
• Improved reconciliations and info requests in a big way
• Created a clear audit trail for both internal and external stakeholders