When scaling your business, email no longer becomes the “best” or “easiest” tool to use. This is why sales departments use Salesforce to manage account status, notes and communications. This is why your IT department has a helpdesk took like JIRA to compile and organize internal inquiries, because traditional email is not scalable. But why then, is your accounting team using disparate accounting email inboxes to manage vendor and customer communications? There is a better way.  

Email was never designed as an accounting tool. Using traditional accounting email inboxes to manage the inflow of communications and documents to/from customers and vendors may make sense on paper, but when managing multiple streams and questions from customers and vendors, dedicated inboxes quickly outgrow their usefulness for accounting teams.  

Still unsure? Here are two signs, you need to find a dedicated tool for your accounting workflows. 

Coverage is difficult to impossible to manage 

Do you dread when a team member is out sick or is scheduling PTO? How do you cover inquiries coming in? Even worse – how do you manage the emails locked in their personal inbox? A large amount of company information gets locked up in email. Email becomes an information silo and when a person is sick, goes on PTO or leaves the company, this information can get lost or disappear completely.  

Email is a closed system where the only person who can search through each account is the individual owner. The individual user can quickly become a bottleneck, preventing collaboration and progress. This prevents sharing and limits the speed and access of information necessary for a group. A shared accounting inbox, eliminates these silos by making activity status and access open to the full team, allowing team members to fill in and respond to an activity stream directly from the system.  

Productivity is key 

At its core, email is a direct communication channel. Fifty years into its lifecycle, it isn’t going away any time soon. Manual accounting activities managed through email are massive time blackholes that drive inefficiency. Time wasted means less time to spend on other things like calling customers, managing financial documents, and more value-add accounting activities.  

The average professional received 120 new emails a day, pre-pandemic. With you, your customers, and vendors working a mix of in-office, hybrid, and fully remote, email levels will continue to rise. Email is the never-ending time suck for accounting teams. Reducing time spent on email (both sending and receiving) can raise productivity. 

Bonus: Work from Home Made Easy 

A shared accounting inbox, like Lockstep Inbox, lives in the cloud and connects to your email and ERP system. This allows your team to collaborate easily from anywhere, at any time. This makes work from home, office, the road, easy for the team. The ability to work from home or while traveling is a powerful advantage. By allowing your team to work from anywhere, while ensuring quality and productivity, you can improve your team’s workload and improve employee morale.   

Lockstep Inbox is designed exclusively for accounting and finance accounting email workflows. Lockstep Inbox is the only shared accounting email tool that connects to both email and your accounting software (think QuickBooks Online or Sage Intacct). With a shared, connected accounting inbox, organization by customer and outstanding activities are built right into the product.