Financial success isn’t magic; it’s planning. Yet, keeping your long-term goals at the top of your head at all times requires effort and a lot of willpower. Even your most common financial tasks already take up too much time and effort. And while they’re vital for the business, the truth is that you can automate these steps without negatively impacting your financial processes.
In 2022 you have no excuse for soaking up your accounting team’s valuable time and energy with clunky manual processes. The plethora of accounting solutions out there means critical finance tasks – such as expense management and invoicing – can now be automated. And here’s how you can reap the rewards:
Finance Automation: Why and How?
As with everything in the corporate space, the obligations and roles of finance experts are always changing. With that comes a greater need for automation and powerful tools capable of streamlining key finance-related tasks like journal entries, accounts reconciliation, and financial statement preparation with little human implication.
Organizations can now streamline their finance operations and eliminate manual tasks that are prone to errors and inefficiency. It’s all about making things simple and making the most of the heavy lifting for you:
- Reduces the likelihood of error: Regardless of your team’s experience in accounting, they’re still human, which means they’re more likely to err. Recent findings hint that 90% of manually-made spreadsheets contain gaps in information or mistakes. That increases the chance of having one single accurate worksheet out of five. Automating the basic financial processes through an accounting software will reduce this scope.
- Ensure data integrity: you may have a trustworthy finance department, but they are reliant on plenty of things beyond their control. Changing policies, minor mistakes, and difficult contractors make it hard to maintain accurate information. But if you automate your data forms, you will be confident there are no manual errors, and you have the correct figures.
- Ensures greater consistency: Despite following the best possible practices in finance, many financial professionals have their own ways of doing things. One person’s bookkeeping practices may be different from another’s. Finding automation solutions will create greater consistency within departments and teams, reducing the scope of information gaps and mistakes.
- Speeds up approvals: Whether it’s a reimbursement claim or a budget approval, automating your approval system will help you save up to eight valuable hours in your workweek. Even better, you can also remove cumbersome email threads on the status of every request.
What Tasks Can you Streamline With Automation Software?
Payroll
Automated payroll software will remove the need for data collection. It will save your accounting department and HR team valuable time and effort by automating the entire process. When choosing a payroll automation software, make sure you look for features such as:
- Automatic payroll processing
- Time tracking
- Flexible pay support
- Tax management
- Reporting
Invoicing
Traditional billing is a boring, ineffective, and time-demanding process. It’s also prone to errors. No matter where and how your business gets customers, things can still get messy quickly when managing invoices for hundreds of customers with different payment terms and cycles.
Automating your invoicing process will ensure that your billing process is accurate. It will also reduce late and missed payments potential.
Expense Management
Currently, 40% of companies manage expense reports manually. At most companies, the expense report is a lengthy and costly process as they manage to spend $58 to price a single report.
But not all those reports are accurate, and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. If you automate your expense management, for which you may wish to explore Zapro Solutions for expense management in order to help you achieve this, you will be sure every department adheres to your expense policy and business rules.
How to Get on Board?
Although a large share of professionals looks to an algorithm for driving direction, trust and interest in financial automation are relatively low. Yet, it’s hard to combat the truth when it comes to automating finance works.
According to a survey, 73% of finance leaders believe automation improves their function’s effectiveness and gives departments more time for value-added tasks. But how can you compel the least tech-minded to adopt automation solutions? Here are a few steps to follow:
Figure Out What you Want to Automate
Not every process and task is built for automation, so consider the following:
- Tedious and repetitive tasks an employee is performing
- Tasks that don’t require a human implication
- Tasks that don’t require creativity or mental energy.
Make sure you note everything that meets these criteria and choose one as the top priority. Automating everything at once isn’t a viable solution.
Assess Your Current Setup
Evaluate the system your organization already has in place. Automation’s all about collaborative programs and improved processes. Dedicated automation solutions are massively accessible, and they can do anything from streamlining your financial process, improving your workflow, and integrating with third-party applications.
Automate, Then Integrate
Once you’ve found the best possible finance automation tool, you will need a way to ensure the software is communicating and sharing information. After all, what’s the point of having a bunch of smooth processes if they don’t even communicate with each other?
There’s no use in automating your accounts receivable if your software isn’t capable of fusing with your inventory management system.
Some of the best accounting solutions out there can easily integrate between tools, meaning the different departments in your business can share information quickly and easily. Make this a top-of-mind priority and ensure there are no gaps between automating tools.
