Your Accounting Inbox Needs a Workflow Overhaul: Part 4

Email was never designed as an accounting tool. Using email to manage the inflow of communications and documents to/from customers and vendors may make sense on paper, but when scaling your operations, or when hiccups to your operations occur, email quickly outgrows its welcome for accounting teams.

For accounting teams, managing accounting tasks through basic email tools is no longer “simple” and in fact causes more problems than it solves. Invoices pile up, and communications from customers and vendors overtake your inbox.

If this sounds familiar, chances are you need to find a dedicated email workflow tool for your accounting team. And why wouldn’t you? Your IT team is using JIRA to manage internal inquiries and your customer success team is using Gainsight to manage questions from your customers.

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

Wasted time means less questions answered

To effectively resolve an activity, your accounting team usually needs 360-degree access to the customer/vendor’s account, invoices, and past communications. Today, however, that requires your team to search through email, spreadsheets, your ERM or accounting software, and that still might not be enough to resolve the issue. Email, of course, is not designed to make access to this information easy for accounting teams, but a shared accounting inbox is. More information means responding faster, and more accurately to resolve challenges completely.

Efficiency is Key

One of the most common signs your accounting team has outgrown email is that they spend large swaths of time, every single day sorting through emails, organizing them, and assigning them for response. This process can be painstakingly slow, error prone, and expensive. A shared accounting inbox helps you streamline and automate the process of organizing email by vendor or customer and assigning activities across the team.

As email volumes grow, accounting teams are using multiple resources to cut and paste responses, download invoices or payment confirmations and when things aren’t tracked perfectly, the team ends up sending the same information over and again to the same customer. In a shared accounting inbox, activities get flagged automatically and queued for assignment. A shared accounting inbox makes it almost impossible for activities to slip by unnoticed. With Lockstep Inbox, for example, invoices, payments, and even contact details entered into your ERP, appear in Inbox automatically, saving time and eliminating the need to keep separate spreadsheets.

The world’s first ever shared inbox is designed exclusively for accounting and finance, Lockstep Inbox creates an online workspace so there’s one place for the accounting team to work together, manage shared activities, and directly connect with customers and vendors. Lockstep Inbox can automatically organize emails and documents by subject and issue for specific vendors, customers, and transactions.  And best of all, it’s free.