Case Study
Strongbox has helped the Kroll TAS team become more efficient with a tool that automatically delivers accurate data straight to Excel.
Scott Elston
Director – Transaction Advisory Services
THE PRACTICE
Embracing the Future with Innovation
Scott Elston is a Director for Kroll's Transaction Advisory Services team. Kroll's TAS team has been providing quality due diligence services for over 20 years.
With over 100 employees on their team, Scott was tasked to collaborate with colleagues to improve and expand process improvement / automation initiatives to ensure TAS continues to enhance its quality client service prospectively.
THE PROBLEM
"How can we wait?"
Scott's TAS team at Kroll was focused on adding additional technology solutions to help the group work toward its goal of continuous improvement. "One of our objectives was to help improve our automation initiatives and unlock time and efficiency for the team This allows us to continue to deliver on-time and cost efficiently on all our clients' mandates."
With these goals in mind and knowing that the right technology can be hard to find, Scott's team was looking for something that was "easy to use, had great customer support, the right pricing, and the functionality we needed."
In his search, Scott heard about Strongbox from a colleague.
"There's been a significant focus on automation in the news recently, and a colleague told me about Strongbox, so I decided to evaluate its capabilities."
THE SOLUTION
"Everyone loves Excel"
Scott's team piloted Strongbox and quickly discovered how easy it is to use and adopt across the team.
"Our team hasn't historically been great at adopting new tech. But everyone loves Excel.
I think that's what was attractive to our team about Strongbox. We had a bit of an internal initiative to automate some of our workbook processes, but we just weren't really willing to commit the resources that were needed to get to the level we saw with Strongbox. But the desire to have that in place was there.
I think that's what was attractive to our leadership team about Strongbox. It's not a whole system. It's Excel. We already have Excel. It's not that big of a change, and it's really easy to use.
Strongbox is what he had hoped to accomplish."
THE RESULTS
"Strongbox saves us time building workbooks and helps improve the quality of our work product."
"One of the criteria evaluated when determining to add technology is will this progression help us deliver a better solution to our clients?
The answer was a resounding yes for the businesses using QuickBooks.
I think that's where the most value is. Strongbox can extract all sorts of schedules automatically and quickly that otherwise we would have to prepare ourselves.
As we think through the time that it typically takes to put these schedules together and format them, that's the primary reason that we went with Strongbox."
Strongbox is also able to improve reliability and enhance quality, two additional goals for the Kroll TAS team.
"I think whenever you automate a process, as long as the automation is working as intended, you're going to enhance quality control and deliver a more reliable and accurate result when leveraged by an experienced and talented team.
I also think it helps the team if they're not having to spend hours building a workbook. It frees up their time to do more analytical work, which is certainly more helpful for their skillset and learning than it is to build the workbook and do formatting stuff."
The end result for Scott and his team: time saved, margins improved, and better staffing for deals.
THE OUTPUT
Most Used Strongbox Data
Income Statement
General Ledger Detail
Balance Sheet
Cash Flow Statement
THE FUTURE
Customized Formats
Scott and his team continue to work with Strongbox to build out a customized output that perfectly matches the Kroll databook branding requirements.
The hope is that these customizations will make the Strongbox output turnkey for the team without any additional formatting adjustments, increasing the time savings significantly.
