City Improves Accuracy, Saves Substantial Time with Wdesk
AMES, Iowa--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Workiva
(NYSE:WK), a leading provider of solutions for enterprise productivity,
today announced that the City
of Rochester, N.Y., is using Wdesk
to improve its Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) process.
“Wdesk has helped us bring our CAFR into one unified document where
everything is linked, which has saved us countless hours and helped
ensure accuracy,” said Rosiland Brooks-Harris, Deputy Director of
Finance for the City of Rochester. A CAFR is a complex financial report
that consolidates data from various departments and must comply with
Governmental Accounting Standards Board requirements.
To build their CAFR, Brooks-Harris and her team collect between 80 and
100 documents from nearly 10 departments. Before Wdesk, the City of
Rochester team built their narrative report separately from their
spreadsheets and added most of their information manually.
With Wdesk,
the team was able to link their narrative and numbers together in a
single document, along with all supporting reports. Any changes
immediately update in all linked instances throughout their CAFR.
“Rounding numbers consistently across spreadsheets was a big issue
before we started using Wdesk,” she explained. “Every number has to tie
among statements, and there was always worry that we might miss
something somewhere. We spent hours trying to match everything. But now
that it’s all linked in Wdesk, we feel comfortable that we have
accurate, consistent information.”
“The majority of the time savings with Wdesk for 2017 was in preparing
the financial statements,” Brooks-Harris said. “We saw increased
efficiencies with our large spreadsheets, and we linked an incredible
amount of data. It has been much better. I wouldn’t go back to the old
system, that’s for sure.”
Wdesk also allows Brooks-Harris’ team to work with their existing
systems. “One of the main reasons we picked Wdesk was because we did not
have to change our legacy systems,” she said. “We had already invested
so much time and effort into mapping our system. If Wdesk were not
flexible, we would have had to start from scratch, which would have more
than doubled our implementation time.”
Wdesk also gives the City of Rochester’s finance team a platform for
controlled collaboration, which is becoming more important as
teamwork-oriented millennials populate the nation’s workforce.
“Younger employees use technology to solve problems differently than
their predecessors,” said Brooks-Harris. “Combined with the
institutional knowledge of our seasoned staff, Wdesk helps us all work
together. It will improve our process for years to come.”
About Workiva
Workiva (NYSE:WK) delivers Wdesk, an intuitive cloud platform that
modernizes how people work within thousands of organizations, including
over 70 percent of the FORTUNE 500®. Wdesk is built upon a
data management engine, offering controlled collaboration, data
connections, granular permissions and a full audit trail. Wdesk helps
mitigate risk, improves productivity and gives users confidence in their
data-driven decisions. Workiva employs more than 1,200 people with
offices in 16 cities. The company is headquartered in Ames, Iowa. For
more information, visit workiva.com.
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Source: Workiva Inc.