Managing today’s accounting email inboxes with limited collaboration capabilities means teams are using Slack, Teams, productivity tools, phone calls, IMs, and smoke signals to close the books.
Inboxes fill up quickly. For accounting teams, collaboration is impossible using out-of-the-box email platforms. 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.
For your reading pleasure, we’ve gathered ten of the top ways email is making your accounting team see red instead of green. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing them all with you! If you missed part one, Activity Management, you can view that, here.
Email Challenge Number 2: Visibility and Accountability
When you don’t have visibility into what has been done or who has been contacted, Kevin Malone at Dunder Mifflin might get emailed the same invoice three times by three different people. “Lots of email make Kevin mad,” as he might say, and Kevin might take his sweet time to process those invoices or pass them off to Oscar, who is far busier than Kevin. When you have a team (or even need PTO coverage), accountability and visibility are sorely missed using the email platforms of today.
Even worse, there is little to no context on past conversations in email. When you can’t track the follow ups and you don’t have easy or any access to conversations other team members have had. And, if those conversations took place outside of email (social media, phone calls, carrier pigeon), well, you’re out of luck, and if Kevin has filed all three of your invoices in the trash folder? You aren’t getting paid any time soon.
Manual accounting processes are inefficient. Relying heavily on email and spreadsheets to manage and organize your accounting workflows only leads to more and more manual, menial work. And what happens to in-progress activities if a team member is out sick, on vacation, or quits? 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.
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