Email as the central communication tool for businesses is likely here to stay, but man, oh man is it broken. Accounting teams depend on email to communicate internally with their teams, and externally with customers, sometimes managing four or more inboxes at a time. 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.

That said, for your reading pleasure, we’ve done the heavy lifting and gathered ten of the top ways email is making your accounting team see red instead of green. Today: Collaboration!

Challenge Number 7: Collabawhat? Email is a tool, not a solution.

Email tools today are inefficient. If your team is like most, you are using several tools to manage your activity streams, communications and collaboration. Email is designed to send and receive communications from an internal or external source. It is not designed to keep track and make sense of your activity streams. Your activity stream will have emails, for sure, but also automations, phone calls, notes, and webforms. Not to mention, your growing stack of to-dos and reminders. Your activity stream goes far beyond your email thread, yet email today can’t capture, track or even tag activities to profiles.

Email by design is not a collaboration tool. Today, you can’t see and update your colleague’s task list, saying “Dunder Mifflin finally paid their invoice, move on to Pawnee Paper.” To collaborate, you need spreadsheets to track status, additional channels (Teams, Phone, etc.) to communicate with your team, and then still must move the details into an ERP or accounting tool to close out the invoice. Nothing is connected and one misstep, incorrect keystroke, or forgotten attachment can send you into a tailspin during audit season.

When it comes to collaboration, email just isn’t designed to do that.

Today’s manual accounting processes rely heavily on email and spreadsheets to manage and organize your accounting workflows. Many teams have accounting workflows that consists of emailing PDFs and spreadsheets back and forth to each other to be opened, read, and manually updated. 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.

Missed one the earlier challenges we featured? Check them out below:

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