Accounting teams depend on email to communicate internally with their teams, and externally with customers, sometimes managing four or more inboxes at a time. Managing today’s accounting email inboxes is extremely labor intensive and limiting. This leaves teams needing to use email, spreadsheets, ERP systems, collaboration tools, productivity tools, phone calls, IMs, and smoke signals to close the books.
At a time when companies leverage automation in everything from the IT helpdesk to sales tracking to HR, the average accounting team is still using the same software stack from 2002. That said, for your reading pleasure, we’ve done the heavy lifting and gathered ten of the top ways email is making your accounting team see red instead of green.
Challenge Number 9: Data, Reporting and Analytics
Know how many emails you sent the last two weeks (you’ll need a calculator for that)? The number of activities you’ve done? Where’s that spreadsheet again? What invoices were paid, which are still outstanding? If I need to send you an invoice and go into my ERP, download the invoice, and then attach as an email, I can’t track the data easily. Email can’t track all of these things and you shouldn’t have to do this manually. What is this, 1993?
Your iPhone can tell you when the International Space Station is overhead and turn on its flashlight using “lumos” from Harry Potter, but your email platform can’t marry an invoice to a customer. Customer information and history, outstanding invoices or payments aren’t in today’s email platforms. Marrying this data is important, but you are left checking platforms, ERP, and spreadsheets to accurately connect with customers and vendors. Talk about a time suck! And knowing where you stack up regarding days sales outstanding (DSO) or AR Aging? Email isn’t designed for that. Heck, your ERP isn’t even designed to show you that data!
In all seriousness, many teams today have an accounting workflow that consists of emailing PDFs and spreadsheets back and forth to each other to be opened, read, and manually updated. This creates disparate, static information that is impossible to keep track of. There’s a better way to manage accounts receivable (AR).
Award-winning Lockstep® connects the world’s accounting teams to help them work better together. The pioneer in Connected Accounting, Lockstep develops tools and platforms for fintech developers and accounting teams to automate workflows between the accounting systems that are at the heart of all businesses.
Missed one the earlier challenges we featured? Check them out below:
- Activity Management
- Visibility and Accountability
- Staying Organized
- Document Management
- Disconnected Search
- The Other Kind of Search
- Collaboration
- No Templates
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