Transforming One Acre Fund’s Manual Month-End With FloQast

Founded in 2006 in Bungoma, Kenya, One Acre Fund is a non-profit social enterprise dedicated to helping East African smallholder farmers grow their way out of poverty by building prosperous businesses. Since its founding, One Acre Fund has expanded across East Africa and now operates in nine countries, serving over 1.5 million farmers. 

The cross-border scope of One Acre Fund’s operations means that it needs an accurate, efficient finance function capable of managing complex close requirements. To meet that challenge, One Acre Fund decided to uplift its accounting workflows by implementing FloQast. 

Before FloQast

Grants Accountant Ange Ishimwe Benimana and Global Accounting Associate Jean Bosco Kalisa Niyitegeka explained how One Acre Fund managed its accounting tasks prior to its transformation with FloQast. 

Ange focused on the company’s predominantly manual month-end close, which involved accountants tracking their progress on a single spreadsheet and coordinating with each other across email threads. That approach was often time-consuming and tedious, with accountants copying and pasting between different sheets, constantly checking their work for updates and errors, and having to follow up with colleagues to confirm that adjustments had been made. 

Jean Bosco also noted the manual complexity of One Acre Fund’s close, pointing out that the spreadsheet had grown to more than 33 tabs and didn’t offer great visibility into task ownership. Additionally, it had become difficult to clearly segregate close duties, and the long email threads were making communication disjointed. 

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The manual close was complex. It wasn’t easy to track team KPIs, or find out which items were contributing to problems. We needed more visibility and control.”

 – Jean Bosco Kalisa Niyitegeka, Global Accounting Associate

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Under those conditions, One Acre Fund’s finance team was taking anywhere from 13 to 15 days to complete the month-end close — a situation that was putting their accountants under a lot of pressure. The leadership team recognised that there was an opportunity to streamline the finance function by automating manual tasks and increasing visibility across teams. 

According to Jean Bosco, One Acre Fund’s senior leadership became aware of FloQast’s close management solution via a peer organisation in the non-profit sector. Impressed by results at that organisation, One Acre Fund added FloQast to a shortlist of target platforms — and eventually selected it as the winner thanks to its simplicity, intuitiveness, and affordability. 

FloQast Implementation

It didn’t take long to see the benefits of FloQast integration, especially for One Acre Fund’s transition toward automation. Jean Bosco emphasised the ease with which the company’s accountants were able to begin using the new software — a process supported at every step by FloQast experts.

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FloQast is easy to use and understand. And the FloQast team has always been there to support us, in real-time.” 

 – Jean Bosco Kalisa Niyitegeka, Global Accounting Associate

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Ange and her team began using FloQast to track their monthly close progress, assign tasks, monitor reconciling items and key accounts, and manage key documents from a centralised location. 

It wasn’t just the practical work benefits that impressed; the One Acre Fund team also found that FloQast significantly boosted month-end visibility, which had a range of downstream efficiency benefits, including better collaboration. Ange stressed the value of FloQast’s third-party integrations to that collaborative effort: Google Drive cloud integration, for example, enables One Acre Fund accountants to work together on important close documents, in real time, wherever they are in the world. 

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The platform helps us work together, shows responsibilities and deadlines for specific people, and we get email reminders for tasks. There are no last-minute surprises with FloQast.”

– Ange Ishimwe, Grants Accountant

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Jean Bosco pointed to the administrative strengths that the transformation has delivered. For example, FloQast’s centralised architecture has facilitated a single source of truth for critical financial documents, which enhances version control during the close and supports the efficiency and accuracy of the audit process. 

Similarly, One Acre Fund management teams can now review and sign off on critical tasks, such as reconciliations, from within the platform at the click of a button. 

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One of the biggest advantages is the transparency that FloQast offers. You’re able to see task completion status instantly — which also improves team accountability. ”

– Ange Ishimwe, Grants Accountant

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Going forward

FloQast implementation has significantly enhanced One Acre Fund’s close speed and efficiency. While it had taken over two weeks to close prior to implementation, with the support of FloQast, the accounting team now consistently closes the books within 10 days. 

One Acre Fund continues to find new opportunities and efficiencies in the FloQast platform, strengthening accountability across teams and departments, improving the quality of collaborative work, and streamlining internal and external audit processes. 

As the company expands into new territories across Africa, lifting up more smallholder farms, Ange expects that FloQast will help drive One Acre Fund’s growth and ambition, and remain at the heart of its finance function. 

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FloQast has been transformative for our company. It’s turned our close process from stressful and fragmented, to structured and efficient. I’m looking forward to what’s next.”

– Ange Ishimwe, Grants Accountant

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