Aspect Energy Shaves 20 Days Off Global Close with FloQast

With domestic and international energy investments and operations across North America and Europe, Aspect Energy’s month-end Close averaged 15-45 days. Since implementing FloQast, Aspect has eliminated manual checklists, centralized team and task accountability, and reduced domestic and international days-to-close to less than 10 and 30, respectively, giving company leaders faster insights, and the finance team more time for strategic priorities and projects.

When leaders at Aspect Energy decided to solicit process improvement ideas from the entire company, Accounting Manager Danielle Brakebill, CPA, knew exactly what to suggest. 

The monthly Close for Aspect had become burdensome and lengthy — sometimes approaching 20, 30, or even 45 days — and Brakebill knew from her experience as an auditor at PwC that some clients had implemented FloQast to fix it.

“We were using SharePoint and incomplete task lists, which were very inefficient and slow,” Brakebill said. “We needed a better and faster way to track roles and responsibilities, report on progress, and speed up the process. I recommended FloQast because I’d seen it work so well in other companies. One of my clients adopted FloQast just before COVID and it turned out to be one of the smoothest audits I had. As we looked into ways to improve our operations, I kept coming back to my experience with FloQast and thought it could really be an asset to us.”

Setting Goals and Designing a Smooth Implementation

Brakebill and IT program manager, Ryan Page, led the FloQast implementation that was also supported by accounting and advisory firm CFGI. Page was impressed with FloQast immediately.

“The communication and collaboration benefits were obvious with FloQast’s integrated task lists and dashboards,” Page said. “The user experience made it seem like a social media platform for accounting workflow, it was very easy to understand and use.”

Page said the FloQast implementation was also one of the best he’s ever managed.

“The attention to detail, responsiveness, and useability of FloQast made this one of my all-time favorite implementations. It was definitely the smoothest, and I think I’ll still be saying that 10 years from now.”

– Ryan Page, Program Manager

In addition to FloQast Close, Aspect is also using Reconciliation Management. Reconciliation management automates account reconciliations with the ERP, instantly pulling new values into FloQast and alerting reviewers of necessary signoffs.

“From a reviewer’s perspective, it makes it so much easier,” Brakebill said. “It generates the reconciliation and journal entry for you. It’s great, I love it.”

The ReMind module, which automates the time-consuming tasks of requesting information, has also added new productivity and time savings.

“We’ve got 153 messages going out each month to various contacts inside and outside of the company, and we’re getting responses to all of them which saves a lot of back and forth,” said Brakebill. “And then being able to sync it to the main checklist is very helpful.”

For training, Brakebill and Page relied primarily on FloQademy tutorials to glean best practices, create initial checklists, and set up more than 150 outgoing ReMind notifications.

“The fact that you’re able to get CPE credits while learning about the product in FloQademy is huge,” she said. “The tutorials were extremely helpful during the training process, and we’ve found a lot of value in the tips and tricks videos as well.”

Workflow Clarity Drives Accuracy and Faster Close — Across the Globe

Stress levels, uncertainty, and the average time-to-close for Aspect’s U.S.-based and international operations have all been reduced for the Aspect team since FloQast went live.

“Our U.S. monthly Close is now down to 10 days, from a high of 12 or 15, and our international quarterly close is under 30 days, down from 45 plus,” said Brakebill. “And we expect to shorten those times even more in the coming months.”

In addition to the new speed and efficiency, team members are working smarter, with more awareness of progress, bottlenecks, and open items that need to be addressed for a timely Close. And company leadership is benefiting as well from faster insights that allow faster decisions on capital expenditures and investments. 

“The biggest win with FloQast is the timeliness and time savings. From reconciliations to information requests, to working with our outside auditors, everything has been streamlined and it’s made a huge difference in team productivity, and team morale.”

– Danielle Brakebill, Accounting Manager