The Lockstep Team is excited to share some of the latest updates to the world’s first shared inbox designed for accounting, Lockstep Inbox. These enhanced features, included in the free application are designed to save you hours of manual processes every week, while enabling you to better collaborate across your accounting workflows.
Approval Activity Improvements
If you’re like most accounting teams, you spend a lot of time managing approvals. Whether it’s AR or AP approvals, getting the right documents and signatures can be a tedious process. That’s why managing approvals within Lockstep Inbox is such an important feature. We have enhanced the approval process, adding in several requested features, making your job a lot easier.
Single Approver / Single Request Updates
Approval processes have been simplified for everyone thanks to the enhancements Lockstep Inbox has implemented in its approval workflow. In our latest update, we have added a “single approver constraint” to the approval workflow, eliminating duplicated requests – allowing users to expedite their responses without worrying about any miscommunication or confusion. With this smarter approval system, exchanges between colleagues are sure to be smoother and more efficient.
On the other side of the equation, it is important to ensure that only one approval request exists for each activity stream. With this restriction in place, users are not able to create more than one approval request for an individual activity stream at a time; however, they can still create another request for a different stream, so long as that stream does not already have an open approval request. This feature helps manage accounting tasks, ensuring that accuracy and efficiency are maintained at all times.
Approval Activities – Request Cancellation
Approval processes can be complicated, daunting, and slow. In today’s rapid work environment, if you have a colleague out of the office or unable to approve items in a timely manner, your approval workflows can slow down to a trickle. With the newly added ability to cancel an approval request, you are in better control of your workflows – allowing you to work smarter, not harder.
Simply select “cancel approval request” and you will be able to send the approval to a different colleague removing the barriers from your workflow. The Requestor out of the office, but you need to move an invoice to pay ASAP, no problem. Anyone with access to Lockstep Inbox can cancel the approval request. This means fewer follow-ups, making approvals smoother and more efficient, making for better overall productivity.
Emoji Support
In the age of digital communication, it’s important to be able to share your thoughts and feelings quickly and easily. That’s why emoji’s have become such a popular way to communicate in the mainstream social media and communication apps. Now, Lockstep Inbox supports emoji responses to activities, notes, and phone calls.
Using emoji responses is a great way to acknowledge a note or phone call without having to write out an entire response. When you’re tagged or involved in an activity workstream, you can respond with an emoji, and it will trigger an automated email that lets your colleagues know you’ve seen the note and are taking action if needed. This feature eliminates the need for laborious replies and helps conversations move at a much faster pace.
Updated Activity Completion Language
As accounting processes become more and more digitized, it is increasingly critical that users are able to work quickly and efficiently within Inbox. Fortunately, the activity completion language has been updated and improved to better mirror your AR and AP workflows.
The update replaces the “close activity” language and icons with “mark as complete” throughout the application. The new language makes it easier for users to understand when an activity is done because it accurately reflects real-world accounting processes. By using this new language, the activity completion process is faster and provides a better user experience overall. It also allows users to easily identify which activities need attention in their assignments as well as those that have already been completed. This update helps streamline your AR and AP workflows so that you can be confident that all of your accounting processes run smoothly without interruption or delays due to confusing language or unnecessary steps being taken along the way.
For accounting professionals, efficiency, and consistency in the software they use is integral to their workflow. By streamlining collaboration with colleagues, automating approvals, and making the application easier to navigate, Lockstep Inbox is making accounting processes faster and easier than ever before. With these changes in place, you can now work smarter – and more productively – than ever. Lockstep Inbox is making it possible for accounting teams to work together effortlessly, driving better results and ensuring accuracy in every decision. It’s time to start taking advantage of the innovative features that Lockstep Inbox has to offer. Get early access to Lockstep Inbox now.
