Overcoming Initial Challenges to Successfully Adopt ART

Founded In 1971 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Bob Mills Furniture has grown across the northern and western part of Texas. Their eight retail locations deliver high quality and affordable furniture and accessories for bedrooms, dining rooms, and living rooms. Today they have expanded their warehouse and are opening more stores.

Due to the company’s rapid expansion and the operational support required, it was becoming more and more difficult each month to complete balance sheet account reconciliations on a timely basis. The accounting team remained very lean, with each member taking on numerous roles. Competing priorities resulted in sometimes pushing back the reconciliation work until far after the month-end close was completed.

Tracking of the close and reconciliation process was ad hoc, manual and cumbersome, and on one occasion, the accounting team discovered that a key account was not fully reconciled for an extended period of time.

As the company expanded, challenges grew within the existing reconciliation process with increasing amount of data, resulting in:

• Missed deadlines
• Lack of real-time visibility
• Time lost retrieving missed data
• Uncoordinated preparation and review process

The accounting team recognized the need to achieve 100% balance sheet coverage and strengthen key controls around financial reporting. This prompted the team to search for automated solutions.

Bob Mills Furniture chose ART to establish a structured and centralized process that was intuitive and allowed their team to close their books with confidence. Since implementing, ART has enabled Bob Mills Furniture to:

• Prepare accurate reconciliations
• Increase visibility within each account
• Help the team reach their reconciliation deadline
• Save time and focus efforts elsewhere in the business
• Reduce 40% to 50% of reconciliation volume each month through system reconciliation rules
• Automate repetitive reconciliations, like prepaid accounts
• Centrally attach and manage supporting documents

The implementation process occurred over the course of one month. All users were trained directly by SkyStem personnel, who were knowledgeable about reconciliation best practices.

The accounting team initially struggled to adopt ART due to other ongoing projects that had to be completed first, as well as staffing changes. However, the team never gave up on the reconciliation project and ended up hiring a new team member to help.

In addition to her regular duties, she was also tasked with leading the full adoption of ART. The SkyStem customer support team reached out to her to re-engage the team in training, and within the first two months, the team was able to complete its very first reconciliation cycle in ART.

Once the team experienced this initial success, users became eager to adjust ART’s capabilities for Bob Mill’s business needs. As a result, the team was able to further reduce reconciliation volume and are now exploring reports and advanced features to streamline the process even more each month.

Bob Mills Furniture utilized SkyStem’s online job aids and customer support service for a better understanding of the specific features that would benefit the company’s needs.

With SkyStem’s award-winning 97% customer satisfaction rating, Bob Mills’ accounting team typically receives a support response in under one hour. For further training, the team also utilized SkyStem’s Genius Academy, which offers daily training courses at no additional cost to customers.

With the help of the customer support team, Bob Mills’ accounting staff, was able to significantly reduce the time spent on simple and recurring reconciliations, and was able to redeploy important resources to other areas during month-end close.

Final Words from the Customer

For other organizations looking to implement ART, Bob Mills Furniture Staff Accountant has the following advice: