The Dallas Cowboys Score an Automated Financial Close Touchdown

The Business Drivers To Automate Their Financial Close

As a rapidly growing and innovative organization, the Dallas Cowboys have always had a strategy around continuous innovation outwardly into the market but also internally when it comes to improving their back-office processes and systems. They understand the importance of implementing leading technology to not only help scale the organization but also empower their people to refocus their time, energy and effort away from those manual, tedious tasks towards more value-added initiatives that in turn help drive the strategic direction of their organization.

“First off, people think we’re a football team — we play on Sunday, we play 16 games a year, we aspire to advance far into the playoffs, and then the playoffs are over in February,” said Tom Walker, CFO of The Dallas Cowboys. “But football is a 24/7 business, 365 days a year. Plus, our organization is unique in that we have extremely large oil and gas and real estate divisions and actually operate as over 150 different companies with roughly 600 full-time employees. There’s a lot more to it than just football, which plays a huge part in our finance and accounting side of the business.”

Achieving a Faster Financial Close

Hear from Tom Walker, Dallas Cowboys CFO on how his team have used Adra Task Manager to help with staffing transitions, streamlining communication between remote employees, and reducing their days to close.

Why Adra by Trintech?

“When we came across the Adra solution, I knew it was something that made sense to implement into our organization” said Walker. In 2020, the Dallas Cowboys implemented the Adra Suite including Adra Matcher (high volume transactions), Adra Balancer (balance sheet reconciliations), Adra Task Manager (financial task management and controls) and Adra Analytics (providing insights and reporting).

“It was a seamless implementation process and our team found instant benefit and relief from the first month we went live” said Walker. “Another key factor in our decision was Adra’s alignment with our technology strategy,” said Walker. While Adra is ERP-agnostic, Adra also provides the first and only financial close solution embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365, enabling companies to close with confidence and automate their close process natively within Dynamics 365.

The Adra Solution In Action

Adra has been instrumental in helping the Dallas Cowboys gain real-time visibility across their financial close process, ensure cash flow management is streamlined, manage risk and standardize internal controls, and close quicker each month with confidence in the numbers they are reporting. In addition, the Adra solution has helped the Cowboys with their internal controls by tracking and documenting everything in
one, centralized place.

“We have all dependent tasks linked within the Adra Suite so the next person has visibility and is notified automatically when they can start the next step in the close process. I truly feel having the Adra solution has taken a load off my team’s plate that used to be spent tracking what journal entries and reconciliations have been completed” continued Walker.