Closing the books. It’s a process well known to every CFO, controller, and accountant across corporate America. It’s painstakingly manual, time-consuming and fragmented but it is critical to ensuring a solid set of books and measuring financial health.
The rapid rise of cloud computing at companies has led to improved efficiency across critical enterprise business activities, such as enterprise resource planning systems. Thanks to the cloud, it is now much easier for companies to integrate data workflows and automate business processes, including the financial close.
That core value proposition—helping companies streamline and manage a financial close—is at the heart of FloQast, which helps customers shave an average of 3 days off the time required to complete the close process.
Norwest is excited to lead the Series C in FloQast. We’ve been impressed by FloQast’s customers’ passion echoed in more than 20 conversations. Not surprising, given the power of its product platform and the founding team’s exceptional leadership and execution.
Leadership and Vision
Strong relationships are central to great companies. And we value our long-standing, working relationship with CEO, Mike Whitmire, who brings excellent leadership and deep domain expertise gained in his accounting roles at Cornerstone (where I worked with him) and Ernst & Young. Cofounders, COO, Chris Sluty and CTO, Cullen Zandstra round out the founding team. Chris brings outstanding domain expertise along with unique skillsets that have strengthened FloQast’s success with customers. Cullen’s strong technical skills combined with his talents for product vision helps deliver potency to FloQast’s solution. Finally, synergy and trusted value flows from Norwest’s prior work with KACE, where several of FloQast’s team members worked.
Automating the Numbers
Managing the month-end financial close is a mandatory, time-consuming event for virtually every company. It involves tracking numerous documents—which are often scattered across separate systems and in the hands of multiple stakeholders—and reconciling with Excel spreadsheets. This helps create more accurate financial statements for the business to gauge its performance to make more informed decisions.
At the heart of FloQast’s cloud-based close-management platform is the ability for companies to integrate their ERP and manage the month-end close process by improving communication and accountability to ensure deadlines are met. It helps align disparate teams, processes, and data in one collaborative platform. Benefits follow, including better visibility, increased transparency and the ability to centralize process documentation, which accelerates the close and improves audit readiness.
A New Market
FloQast is now poised to grab a significant share of the close-management market, an underserved category that is ripe for disruption. Despite its critical importance, accounting has been late to receive attention from innovative cloud technology and reap the benefits of lower costs and better efficiency.
As finance teams across industries further automate the close-management process with FloQast, accountants everywhere will realize the benefits of cloud computing—and approach the end of the month with a lot less apprehension.
