What is Lockstep® Inbox?

Lockstep is pleased to announce our latest offering, Lockstep® Inbox. Revolutionizing accounting, Lockstep Inbox creates an shared inbox where accounting teams professionals can work better with customers and vendors.

Today, more than 90% of accounting professionals are using manual personal, email inboxes and spreadsheets to manage their “digital” accounting workflows. This 90% didn’t have any automation connected to their accounting inboxes through collaboration software, until now.

For other departments, shared inboxes automate critical workflows, they take over the group inbox (think AR@companyX.com) and integrate with other systems. Sales has a CRM system like Salesforce, support has customer support systems like Zendesk. Even IT has a solution like JIRA to manage tickets and status of requests, but accounting has been left with manual solutions.

Today, email is the number one way that accounting professionals work customers and vendors in their drive towards digitalization. Because, accounting systems don’t have a native inbox integration, accounting teams are forced to rely on generic email software to communicate with customers and vendors. This is where Lockstep Inbox comes in.

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. This vastly improves efficiency in terms of managing that existing workflow, while integrating directly with their accounting system. More importantly, Lockstep Inbox allows for communications to be automatically composed and addressed saving massive amounts of time in working with customer and vendors.

Who is Lockstep Inbox For?

Simply put, anyone accounting professional working with customers and vendors.

Designed as a shared inbox, Lockstep Inbox is meant for the individual or a team in the accounting department who communicates directly with customers and/or vendors. With functionality across both accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP), Lockstep Inbox allows the accounting department to have a workflow automation by connecting the ERP and email software (Outlook or Gmail) to manage and collaborate on accounting activities easier and smarter.

Lockstep Inbox streamlines accounting workflows so you can send out invoices and pay vendors faster, keeping you organized and your business running soundly. And it gets even better. It’s free-forever.

What Does Lockstep Inbox Do?

Lockstep Inbox integrates your disconnected email software and ERP system, allowing you automate workflow. With this connection, Lockstep Inbox allows you to manage and collaborate on accounting activities in a single, shared workspace through an automated email platform designed exclusively for accounting teams.

Lockstep Inbox eliminates the need for separate spreadsheets and email folders to track and manage customer and vendor communications, requests, and outstanding invoices. With Lockstep Inbox, invoices, payments, and even contact details entered into your ERP, appear in Inbox automatically, saving time and eliminating the need to keep separate spreadsheets.

With activity streams, Lockstep Inbox automatically organizes your communications to vendors or customers in a timeline of activities (emails, phone calls, invoices, payments, etc.) so you can see it in one, single location the “stream” of conversations with that individual or organization. If a response isn’t needed for weeks, you can even “snooze” an activity to move your processes along smoothly.

“The real power of Lockstep Inbox is it’s automating all the menial, error-prone, time-consuming activities associated with tracking status and communicating with trading partners,” notes Cofounder and CSO of Lockstep, Matthew Shanahan.

Lockstep Inbox takes the search and guesswork out of accounting workflows, with vendors and customers emails, phone calls, and notes organized into streams, you can easily follow up with a request or answer a question with a click of a button. Because it’s integrated directly into your accounting system, you no longer need to open a separate spreadsheet or system to track follow-ups, saving time and preventing headaches.

Lockstep Inbox and Collaboration

At its core, Lockstep Inbox vastly improves collaboration with customers and vendors. Within Lockstep Inbox, you are able to assign activities to individuals and ensure nothing falls through the cracks, while having visibility into who is working on which activities and their status.

If an activity cannot be completed or the team needs additional details, there is a “snooze” option to allow them to move onto the next task, without that activity moving into someone else’s queue. This streamlines efficiencies and prevents workflows from being disrupted. Additionally, Lockstep Inbox has a notes section for the team to collaborate without relying on separate communications tools.

At the click of a mouse, Lockstep Inbox brings in historical data, documents, invoices, payments, and more, eliminating the need to have multiple applications open or physically moving documents from one system to another. This greatly streamlines requests and actions to customers and colleagues, taking place in a single application.

With Lockstep Inbox, collaboration is a click away.

When Is Lockstep Inbox Available?

Lockstep Inbox is available today with integrations into QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Sage Intacct. Start revolutionizing your accounting today!

How Do I Get Started?

Easy. You can sign up for a free account, here. You can connect your ERP and get started with Inbox in as little as 5 minutes.

The first hundred or so sign-ups will be asked to participate in an onboarding call with a Lockstep expert to walk through the processes.

Is It Really Free?

Yes. Lockstep believes that accounting teams have been ignored for far too long by software companies, especially in terms of collaboration tools. We developed Lockstep Inbox with a free subscription plan because we want to remove access barriers for accounting teams and make their work easier and more fulfilling. As needed, accounting teams can upgrade to paid plans that have advanced automation.