Lockstep Introduces Accounting Inbox for AR and AP

Lockstep replaces personal inboxes with the first-ever accounting inbox for accounts receivable (AR) and accounts Payable (AP).

FREMONT, CA: Lockstep, the connected accounting cloud that accelerates cash flow significantly, announced its launch out of stealth mode. Since its inception in 2019, Lockstep has expanded its reach beyond the firm’s initial customer base and has now been integrated with 40 accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

Lockstep replaces personal inboxes with the first-ever accounting inbox for accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP). Lockstep makes it simple to assign work, create workflows, divide work, and monitor progress, all visible within a shared team workspace.

Lockstep also offers profile management that empowers clients and vendors to check their organizational details, contacts, and compliance records all by themselves, establishing a credible, compliant connection between the accounting departments of trading partners. Accounting departments using Lockstep have boosted monthly cash flow by more than 30 percent through on-time payments and collections.

"Over the last decade we've seen all externally-facing departments - sales, support, customer success, marketing – use advanced email automation as part of digital transformation," said Matt Shanahan, Chief Strategy Officer and Cofounder at Lockstep. "But AR and AP have been left behind in the cash traps of personal inboxes and spreadsheets, creating information blackholes, multiplying bottlenecks, and more manual work – all of which slows cash flow. We created Lockstep to eliminate these cash traps, increase productivity, and make working with other accounting departments easier."

While the ubiquitous nature of email should provide an apparent path for digital transformation, paper invoice delivery still accounts for nearly 40 percent of the 300 billion invoices sent between trading partners annually. Lockstep's work with customers has discovered that 30-70 percent of customer or vendor records miss an email address or have provided misleading or incorrect information. The trapped cash will grow in the absence of a new accounting-specific solution that facilitates the transition from paper and eliminates personal inboxes. Lockstep solves this problem with connected accounting, enabling companies to migrate their AR and AP relationships to email and online.

"While most were sheltering in place due to the pandemic, many companies still had staff in the office to deal with paper invoices, and remote staff's emails went into the personal inbox blackhole. In the past several months, it became abundantly clear that the process is broken. Lockstep's cloud-based solution addresses these pain points head-on by creating trusted, compliant connections using the ubiquitous nature of both email and the web,” added Shanahan.