Accounting Software for the 21st Century: Tools to Help You Close in 2018

You might not know it, but there’s a battle going on right now for the future of the accounting profession. It’s going on behind the scenes in the world of software vendors with two main camps — old school, legacy enterprise solutions, and today’s modern, agile apps.

Legacy Enterprise Solutions

On one side, you have the incumbents — developers of enterprise all-in-one solutions, typically marketed to companies both large and small as the solution to all their problems.They’ve been around for a long time, perhaps even long enough to have made the trek from being an on-premises solution to the cloud. Or maybe they haven’t moved at all, and you're still forced to pay for an annual maintenance contract.Regardless, the thing that all of these legacy enterprise solutions have in common is that they are often extremely rigid and painful to implement since they require the accounting team to change the way they work.An example of one of these legacy apps would be our competitor BlackLine. Their software forces accountants to leave behind their beloved Excel spreadsheets and shared drive in favor of clunky web forms. And you can’t even use those web forms for complex reconciliations, so you have to then use both their software and Excel.What a waste of time!

Modern Agile Apps

On the other side, you have the challengers — developers of new apps built from the ground up that live in the cloud. These apps are agile and collaborative. Rather than trying to replace the other apps accountants already use and love, they integrate with them to add to their functionality.As one of those challengers, we at FloQast have a very different idea of what software should be, and we’re proud to be challenging the status quo. We believe that modern accounting software should layer on top of your existing process, not tear it apart.Rather than force accountants into new ways of closing the books, FloQast works the way accountants already do by leveraging the tools they use, such as Box, OneDrive, and Excel. We also integrate with popular ERP systems such as NetSuite and Sage Intacct.With FloQast, you can continue to do your reconciliations in Excel. We then augment that process by tying your Excel outputs back to the trial balance (as well as facilitating all of the task management, document management, and sign-offs, just to name a few capabilities).This approach works. The proof is in the user satisfaction ratings.

FloQast v. BlackLine: It’s Not Even Close

A comprehensive G2 Crowd Analysis of FloQast and BlackLine reviews shows that mid-size companies give FloQast vastly superior marks:

FloQast beats BlackLine by 98% to 36% in user satisfaction among midsize companies*. It’s not even close!FloQast wipes the floor with BlackLine thanks to our success in three key areas:

• Quality of support and investment in customer success
• Ability to meet requirements both today and in the future
• Organizational fit and ease of use

Why FloQast Wins with Midsize Companies

Interestingly, while we still have higher user satisfaction among large companies, it’s much closer ( 88% to 82%). But that’s to be expected.Large companies have the budgets and time to spend on long, complex implementations. It doesn’t matter to them as much that the application requires changing how they work. They’ve got plenty of staff, and enough resources to dedicate to remaking their monthly close workflows.Midsize companies, on the other hand, are in short supply of all of these things. They don’t have a lot of staff. They don’t have a lot of time. And it’s rare that they have money to burn on expensive enterprise accounting software. And that’s why, we think, they’re often disappointed with BlackLine.

Interested in learning more about the differences between FloQast and BlackLine? Download the Financial Close Software Comparison: G2 Crowd Reviews Analysis.

* Comparative review data licensed by FloQast. Review data is based on G2 Crowd reviews from verified FloQast and BlackLine users. Review data was captured in September 2017 and is summarized at: https://www.g2crowd.com/grid_report/documents/floqast-vs-blackline-product-comparison-report