Outdoor Living Supply: From a 4-Week Close to Under 10 Days

With FloQast, OLS centralized its close, cleared a multi-year backlog, and built audit-ready processes to scale with continued acquisitions.

THE CHALLENGE FOR OLS

Growth Outpaced the Accounting Infrastructure

Outdoor Living Supply was built on a model of rapid expansion, partnering with local legacy businesses to preserve local connections and provide supportive technology to grow a national platform. But as the company scaled, the pace of acquisitions quickly outstripped the finance department's infrastructure, creating a widening gap between how fast the business was growing and how quickly accounting could keep up.

In its early years, OLS lacked a centralized accounting function, leaving the team to inherit fragmented processes, years of aging data, and a growing backlog of operational debt. When Heather Sherman joined as Senior Cost Accountant, she recognized the root causes quickly and set about designing systems the department needed. Critical balance sheet accounts, such as Goods Received Not Invoiced (GRNI), had gone unreviewed for three to four years. Documentation was scattered across OneDrive and SharePoint, with no consistent system for tracking how or why financial entries had been made.

The risk was not just operational. Because processes were not documented in a centralized system, the reasoning behind financial entries lived only in the heads of a few individuals. If a team member left, years of transaction context left with them. For a PE-backed company under heavy scrutiny and acquiring new entities at pace, that fragility was a serious liability.

Without a standard framework, each acquisition compounded the complexity of an already strained close. The process was entirely manual, relying on spreadsheets to manage tasks, update statuses, and track supporting documentation. Without real-time visibility into progress, the close stretched from two weeks to as long as four. Audit preparation became a months-long effort requiring teams to track down files across multiple systems.

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“Task tracking was limited to manual spreadsheets—copied into new tabs each month, with old notes deleted and dates updated by hand. It was a time-consuming, error-prone environment that offered no visibility into where work stood or who owned the data.”

— Heather Sherman, Senior Cost Accountant, OLS

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HOW FLOQAST HELPS

OLS Builds a Structured, Scalable Close

OLS recognized that solving these challenges required more than incremental improvement. Rather than layering automation onto a fragmented process, the team focused on building a structured foundation that could support continued growth and withstand the scrutiny that comes with a high-velocity acquisition model.

To do this, OLS implemented FloQast Close to centralize and standardize the close. By moving away from spreadsheets and into a single system, the team established a clear source of truth for all close-related activities:

• Tasks were clearly assigned with completion timestamps visible to the whole team
• Progress was tracked in real time, replacing the monthly tab-copying ritual
• Supporting documentation was linked directly to each checklist item

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"Tech-savvy teams often build inward, creating custom SharePoint workflows, Power Automate flows, and complex Excel dashboards. While functional, these solutions concentrate knowledge in one person and require constant maintenance. FloQast offers a structured, auditable platform built specifically for accounting—providing an intuitive system from day one, backed by FloQademy’s on-demand training to ensure expertise is shared rather than siloed."

— Heather Sherman, Senior Cost Accountant, Outdoor Living Supply

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With this structured foundation acting as the "guardrails," the team turned to one of its most persistent challenges: a multi-year backlog of unreconciled GRNI transactions. Using AI Transaction Matching, OLS automated large portions of the reconciliation process. The team integrated Heather’s specialized NetSuite SQL searches into FloQast's matching engine to work upstream of the problem, clearing years of accumulated data in a matter of weeks. AI Variance Analysis added another layer of integrity by surfacing anomalies during the close in real time.

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“We didn't have FloQast until early 2025, so preparing for audit meant hunting down files across systems and relying on institutional knowledge. Our Controller, Ivan Bisbee, recognized the department needed a streamlined, centralized solution and got in touch with FloQast. That decision was a game-changer.”

— Heather Sherman, Senior Cost Accountant, Outdoor Living Supply

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With the Controller managing a demanding workload, Heather took ownership of the implementation: coordinating with IT, configuring the platform, and leading the team through adoption. As the backlog was resolved, OLS used Journal Entry Management to strengthen internal controls. Previously, the ERP allowed the same user to create and approve entries, a segregation of duties risk that JEM closed by design, finally giving Accounting Manager Becky Heins the structured approval workflow she had long advocated for. Supporting documentation, including the underlying Excel logic, was attached directly to each entry and linked to specific checklist items, creating a clear and traceable audit trail.

With all activities managed in a single system, leadership could identify bottlenecks, refine workflows, and shift focus from simply completing the close to improving how the process itself was designed.

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THE FLOQAST DIFFERENCE

Faster Close. Stronger Controls. A Foundation Built to Scale.

The most immediate impact was time reclaimed. By reducing the close from up to four weeks to under ten days, the accounting team freed up weeks of manual effort each month. That capacity matters in a business growing through acquisition, because it allows the team to onboard new entities without a proportional increase in headcount.

Audit preparation, which once required months of manual effort to locate and validate documentation, is now significantly more streamlined. Centralizing supporting materials and creating a traceable audit trail changed the working relationship with external auditors, reducing friction and lowering year-end audit costs in the process.

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“That's what I love about FloQast. It doesn't just help you reconcile accounts—it helps you build better processes. The question shifted from 'Did this get done?' to 'Is this designed the right way?' That's a fundamental change in how a finance team thinks.”

— Heather Sherman, Senior Cost Accountant, OLS

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The accounting function has moved from reactive cleanup to intentional process design, with greater ownership distributed across the team. Members were encouraged to build and refine their own AI matching rules, which prevented technical bottlenecks and gave the team genuine agency over their workflows. With weeks of time freed up each month, the team now identifies improvement opportunities in vendor coding and lease data that directly impact the bottom line.

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“The real impact isn't only time saved. It's clarity. It's confidence. When the foundation is strong, the progress compounds.” 

— Heather Sherman, Senior Cost Accountant, OLS

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