As time passes and the majority of companies continue to work from remote locations, the current work environment is repeatedly referred to as the “new normal”. Perhaps you are hunkered down in your home, applying hand sanitizer every 30 minutes. Maybe you’re working on your multi-tasking skills, attending meetings while attempting to entertain a small child. Or perhaps you don’t see what all the fuss is about and just wish you could find toilet paper. Whatever your opinion, this unique situation offers an opportunity for some perspective on the way companies facilitate their financial close.

Even before everyone began working remotely, upwards of 43% of Americans worked from home at least part-time, with accounting roles in the list of most common remote jobs. Being able to work remotely has been— and will continue to be— very important when considering the completion of your financial close. There is a good chance we will see a shift in how workforces are composed once we are out of this current crisis.

In today’s unique work environment, collaboration is more crucial than ever before. Each day presents new challenges— including encouraging your employees to maintain a high level of productivity. Without human interaction most are used to in the office, there is a tendency to slack off and not work as effectively with others. By now, most of you have realized how technology is changing the role of the accountant up close and personal. Your teams have shifted to a remote work environment out of necessity. Conversations are happening to ensure productivity remains high, email inboxes are flooding and that ultra-important email could become white noise.

This only emphasizes the importance of integrating your Adra Suite with tools that open communication, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams®— a capability the Adra Suite now offers. By using our simple integration from the Adra Suite to either Slack or Microsoft Teams, you can receive targeted notifications of all activities throughout your financial close.

With a few simple steps, you can transform the way your team goes about its close, promoting collaboration with a more efficient way to share information. Slack and Microsoft Teams are both robust productivity platforms that allow users to send messages, data, gifs and just about anything else in a user-friendly environment. This means your close process just became significantly more manageable. By integrating your financial close software with Slack or Microsoft Teams, you can receive live updates via these communication platforms, in addition to email notifications, and cut down on the exorbitant status update meetings that so often occur while working from home.

Integrating Microsoft Teams® and Slack with the entire Adra Suite opens the flow of communication among your finance team, increasing the speed of your close process. Whether it’s live updates on tasks performed in Task Manager, transactions matched in Matcher or messages from your team members asking important questions about the status of a reconciliation in Balancer, this new environment will be a hub of information for you and your team, driving productivity and fostering a healthy, communicative work ethic— all vital attributes for an efficient financial close.

If your team isn’t utilizing financial close automation, completing the close process remotely is likely very difficult. Offices of finance typically rely on spreadsheets throughout their close, however, spreadsheets are not always accurate— in fact, 90% of all spreadsheets contain errors.  And, because businesses are now increasingly forced to make quick decisions based on the numbers in front of them, the risk that your company will make a bad decision is high.

To learn how to integrate your Adra products with Microsoft Teams and Slack, watch these videos.

Microsoft Teams:

 

Slack:

 

 

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Written by: Peter Whisenant & Jon Sykora

[1] Hickman, A. Levey, I.R. (2019). How to Manage Remote Employees. gallup.com

[2] Hess, A. (2018). There are the 14 most common remote jobs— here’s how much they pay. cnbc.com