Email has become the central tool for accounting teams. But it was never meant to be used as the centerpiece for your accounting technology stack. These 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.
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. To us, that’s inefficient and creates real breaks in an already tedious process.
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!
Email Challenge Number 3: Staying Organized
Accounting teams need constant vigilance to keep a clean inbox, and to ensure accounts, communications, and next best activity is organized. Whether you use post-its, remote folders, folders in your email account, or you keep data in a spreadsheet with more tabs than should be allowed, organization is key to financial health. To stay organized, you need all of these tools and more, because email tools were not designed for accounting teams. Today, teams have to bounce back and forth from email and ERP back to email and then again to the ERP to keep everything organized.
In the email platform, the best practice is to have a “clean inbox” policy that moves any email pertaining to a completed task to a customer-specific folder. While this method keeps your inner Marie Kondo satisfied, it doesn’t solve for communications outside of email, communications that go to the wrong inbox, or junk mail folder nor does it track payments.
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. By only using these manual processes, accounting workflows can’t scale. Email being disconnected to the ERP means you are out of luck if something is set in the wrong folder or accidentally deleted. And, this should go without saying, but email should never, ever, ever be your single source for document storage, but more on that in a later blog. 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:
Editor’s Note: Get more accounting done with less stress and effort with Lockstep Inbox , our free accounting inbox that will help you act on the customer and vendors that need attention.
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