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How Floodgate saved 20+ hours in audit prep using Aumni
Oct 18
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4
min read
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Sydney Johnson
Aumni created document controls and streamlined service provider workflows, leading to massive time savings during Floodgate’s audit.
About Floodgate:
Background: Floodgate is a venture capital firm focusing on early-stage (pre-seed and seed) technology company investing.
Investment focus: B2B, B2C, financial technology, healthcare, SaaS, and technology sectors.
AUM: $600M
Company Size: 13 employees
Year Founded: 2006
Challenges: Getting and managing fully executed transaction documents
With a finance and operations team of one, Floodgate had to manage their audit with limited support. Previously, they would receive transaction documents directly from their legal team at Silicon Legal Strategy (SLS) or their portfolio companies. Floodgate would then save all documentation on a file server, but managing version control and ensuring all documentation was audit-ready was difficult. The team often received drafts, not the fully executed documents their auditors required, putting a massive burden on Floodgate’s already lean finance and operations team to follow up with their portfolio companies and outside counsel to obtain final copies. Then, the additional task of sharing the correct documents with their auditors pulled their finance team away from higher-impact work.
Floodgate needed a solution to help them upgrade document controls and processes for accounting and audit purposes that was also easy to integrate with their existing service provider workflows, including their fund admin, legal team, and auditors.
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Solution: Create a trustworthy system for transaction review ahead of audit
Floodgate implemented Aumni to drive new efficiencies for their finance and fund admin teams, focusing on data and document controls. They relied on Aumni’s proprietary review process to ensure data accuracy. Then, they re-engineered their service provider workflow with Aumni at its center to help offload transaction document management and sharing.
In this new system, Floodgate submits its transaction documents to Aumni for review. Aumni then validates documents (PDF, fully executed, and no redlines) and ensures completeness (no missing pages, sections, or exhibits) before extracting the underlying deal data. Data is reconciled against Aumni’s entire database before being structured and populated in Floodgate’s Aumni account. Floodgate tracks the document review progress via the Aumni Audit Log to learn which documents are missing, incomplete, or erroneous so they can follow up with their founders or SLS.
Once transaction documents have passed review, Floodgate’s fund admin team will book the transaction and use Aumni data to update their accounting records and transaction ledger before the final internal review. By proactively keeping documents and records up to date throughout the year, Floodgate was months ahead on audit prep.
“Aumni played a role in improving efficiencies in Floodgate's workflow process and document controls," says Floodgate's CFO Lori Simotas. "Effective back-office operations are crucial for optimizing overall performance and ensuring smooth day-to-day functions. Aumni, as a platform and service, provided valuable support in this endeavor.”
The Floodgate team knows that their data is accurate and legal documentation is complete, so they can grant their auditors direct access to Aumni during their audit. Auditors can then confidently self-serve the documents they need, cutting down on additional auditor requests that distract the finance team from other end-of-year reporting.
Results: Massive time savings in audit
Floodgate saw the audit process improve in the first year of implementing Aumni. By building the Aumni platform into their workflows, they could offload review processes and improve data and document fidelity for their own records. Furthermore, by onboarding their fund admin and auditors on Aumni, Floodgate gave their service providers the data, documents, and tools needed for audit execution, cutting down significantly on auditor back-and-forth. The result? More than 20 hours were saved during the audit season for Floodgate’s team.
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