THE CHALLENGE FOR THE ACCOUNTING FIRM
Before FloQast, the Client Accounting Services (CAS) team didn’t have a single way to close the books. Growing from a lean team of 25 to a sprawling group of 65, the manual processes that worked in 2018 began to fracture. Without a global system to track the status of each client job, job managers had no reliable way to know where client work stood, relying on varied to-do lists and non-standardized work papers. "Everyone tracked their to-dos differently," noted the Manager. "If someone left for vacation or maternity leave, it was incredibly hard to hand off those responsibilities".
The team needed a single system of record where every balance-sheet account had a reconciliation, every checklist rolled up to a job manager, and any accountant could pick up another's work without a week of onboarding.
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— Manager, Client Accounting Services
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HOW FLOQAST HELPS
The firm’s journey to modern close automation wasn't immediate; they initially trialed an alternative workflow solution, committing to a rollout and piloting with select clients. However, they soon ran into a wall: the backend ERP connectors wouldn't hold, and getting them to function in an automated, reliable way required one of the team's managers to teach herself backend database programming languages.
"That was our breaking point," she said. "When I was all of a sudden learning database code, we thought, 'Maybe this isn't what we signed up for.'"
The team quickly paused their initial implementation and approached FloQast, looking for a specialized workflow tool that featured existing API connectors to various ERPs while remaining exceptionally easy to use and implement across a large group. "We knew we had to roll this out to 60 people, so we couldn't have a solution that required a significant amount of training," explained a Manager. "Seeing how intuitive FloQast was during evaluation became a massive factor for us."
The transition prioritized ERP flexibility and AI-driven automation, which was driven by several key components:
FloQast’s implementation team acted as true partners, helping standardize work papers and ensuring every single account had a clear, repeatable reconciliation procedure. The firm took a disciplined, phased approach based on Job Managers, establishing a centralized workflow that allowed the team to build complex matching logic for high-volume transactions using natural language rather than rigid backend code.
Once the foundation was in place, the team leaned heavily into AI Transaction Matching to handle "special project" cleanups. Staff were empowered to tackle high-volume projects using natural language to build rules for complex clearing accounts. By allowing practitioners to build logic themselves without an IT intermediary, the firm turned an administrative chore into a scalable capability.
The true power of this shift was realized during a massive clearing account project where years of unmanaged transactions had piled up.
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— Manager, Client Accounting Services
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THE FLOQAST DIFFERENCE
The shift to FloQast fundamentally altered the firm's service delivery and internal culture. On specialized client projects, processing times plummeted by 37.5%, dropping from an eight-hour manual process to just five hours using automated rule matching. This immense efficiency allows the firm to pivot from routine data entry to analyzing high-risk exceptions.
Beyond speed, the centralized oversight has fundamentally restored confidence for the firm's leaders, eliminating the need to micromanage. To harness this newly structured data, the firm collaborated with its internal analytics group to pipe FloQast’s tracking data into a custom Domo reporting dashboard. This allowed managers to seamlessly monitor real-time completion status and identify outstanding review tasks across more than 20 job managers without having to dig through system notifications.
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— Manager, Client Accounting Services
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That confidence extended directly to clients. In a standalone victory involving a legacy cleanup, a client arrived with seven years of completely unreconciled clearing account data. What would have been a “nose dive” into wasted manual hours was resolved via AI in minutes, identifying necessary write-offs and giving the client newfound peace of mind. Impressed by the security and speed AI added, the client asked the firm to turn the cleanup into a recurring quarterly engagement. What had previously been too labor-intensive to offer profitably became an entirely new revenue stream.
For all FloQast-covered accounts, the practice now maintains an incredibly high state of audit and tax readiness year-round. Standardized work papers and clear sign-off documentation mean that these specific, platform-managed engagements remain beautifully organized, enabling practitioners to trade manual highlighting for advisory-level consulting. Budget-conscious clients who couldn’t previously justify the cost of manual reconciliation can now be served profitably using natural language automation.
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— Manager, Client Accounting Services
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