Using Wdesk to save time for private company reporting

Some people may think Wdesk is only practical for public companies to create SEC-mandated reports and releases—but that couldn't be further from the truth. A growing number of private companies, like Origin Bank, use Wdesk to create earnings and audit reports for investors and internal needs alike.

Before senior accountant Jordan LaBoarde started working for Origin Bank, the reporting team went through the tedious process of manually entering earnings into Word^® documents and making sure the numbers were consistent. The team had to go through each page of the document and confirm the numbers stayed true from the previous report. In all, this process took a solid 3–4 days in each reporting cycle.

As LaBoarde noted, one of the jobs of the accounting department—regardless of the firm's public or private status—is to spot inefficiencies in the workplace. Ironically, the team found that its process to create those reports was inefficient.

When a new controller began at Origin Bank, she saw the current situation and insisted on using the same solution she had used in a previous position—Wdesk.

"While creating the earnings releases before I got there, [our controller] told our CAO that we needed to get Wdesk—it would make our lives so much easier." LaBoarde said. "We did, and now we use it for the earnings release, our annual report, and we’re starting to use it for our internal audit."

With Wdesk, the accounting team has simplified the process of creating quarterly, monthly, and yearly reports.

LaBoarde and her team cut time and energy using Wdesk Support Binders to review the report. The digital binders also decreased the cost of having external auditors in the office to review the reports.

Prior to Wdesk, Origin Bank's external auditors and CAO had to sign off on the report before it was finalized. Now, Support Binders reassures them that the information is accurate in a timely fashion. The binders in Wdesk show the data source and give the auditors the ability to see exactly what has changed and the supporting reasons for the changes. If there is ever a problem or question, the answer is easy to access in Wdesk.

"Our external auditors love the fact that they can go in and see what we are doing exactly when we are doing it," LaBoarde said. "I get calls asking for updates, and as soon as I share the document in Wdesk, the changes update within the reports in real time."

In addition to producing a better report, the team spends less time with auditors, which saves the company money. "Our CFO noticed how quickly we've been turning reports," LaBoarde said. "This year’s annual report compared to last year’s annual report was a whole new ball game."

Because the end of the year is so hectic for Origin Bank, being able to get the report out a whopping 30 days earlier than the previous year saved an enormous amount of time and money for the bank.

Wdesk from Workiva is a cloud based solution that takes full advantage of the AWS Cloud. Supported services include Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Cloudwatch, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Glacier, Amazon SQS, Amazon S3, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Route53, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS KMS, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon APIGateway, AWS SNS, AWS Xray and more.

Workiva delivers Wdesk, a leading enterprise cloud platform for data collaboration, reporting, and compliance that is used by thousands of organizations worldwide, including over 70 percent of the 500 largest U.S. corporations by total revenue. Companies of all sizes, state and local governments, and educational institutions use Wdesk to help mitigate risk, improve productivity, and gain confidence in their data-driven decisions. For more information about Workiva (NYSE:WK), please visit workiva.com.