Is your finance crew spending an excessive amount of time on handbook processes?
May automation provide you with extra time?
Ideally, because the CFO or monetary supervisor, your finance crew has a strategic position, supporting you, the CEO and the management groups to make important enterprise selections that form the long run.
However what in case you don’t have time to do this vital work?
What in case you’re spending 10 or extra days on month-to-month monetary closes, reviewing and reconciliating your data?
You might need month-to-month closes, quarterly closes, or annual audits to take care of.
At the moment for many companies, there’s a variety of repetitive work concerned to get by way of these cycles as a result of time-consuming handbook processes.
On this article, we spotlight the way you and your finance crew can say farewell to these handbook processes courtesy of automation.
Right here’s what we cowl:
Challenges of handbook processes for finance groups
Managing processes might be time-consuming for finance groups, particularly with issuing and processing invoices, holding observe of budgets, and creating monetary reviews.
As your online business grows and processes and reporting grow to be extra advanced, it’s widespread to waste unimaginable quantities of time with handbook knowledge entry, unruly spreadsheets and time-consuming workarounds.
Regardless of how expert your finance division could also be, any system that depends on manually inputting data from paper is slow and subject to human error.
Each time a chunk of paper adjustments fingers, you introduce a possibility to misinterpret, misplace or misunderstand one thing.
For an organization that handles tens of 1000’s of invoices per thirty days, even a tiny margin of error can lead to big losses.
Guide processing additionally results in a scarcity of management and visibility, leaving you unable to make knowledgeable selections to successfully lead your crew, creating an setting susceptible to fraud.
How spreadsheets are slowing the monetary shut course of
Spreadsheets are low cost and versatile.
Everyone knows how they work. And in a lot of circumstances, they are often actually helpful.
Nevertheless, a big downside with spreadsheets is that you have to enter calculations as formulation, so it’s worthwhile to be taught the right method for every calculation you want.
And that may be a giant downside in terms of coping with your financial close processes.
Coaching for this takes time, and a few customers nonetheless discover them difficult.
When you enter a method or knowledge right into a cell incorrectly, all calculations associated to that cell can even be improper.
Giant spreadsheets can inevitably have some enter or method errors, which might be time-consuming to search out and result in extreme penalties if uncorrected.
You’ll be able to add spreadsheet on prime of spreadsheet as you want them.
However as your online business grows, your workbooks will grow to be extra advanced, resulting in extra time wasted on upkeep.
The extra advanced spreadsheets are, the extra of an issue it may be for anybody to alter, modify and even destroy knowledge.
When you lock them down, they lose the very flexibility that made you employ them within the first place.
Why automation can velocity issues up
By incorporating automation into your monetary processes, you possibly can considerably scale back shut days, improve agility, decrease prices, enhance productiveness, scale back delays, minimise errors, and in the end give your crew extra time to give attention to technique, enterprise progress and success.
Automation can lower the monetary near a extra manageable three to 5 days and has the potential to get rid of the close entirely.
At some point sooner or later, you may be capable to automate all of the processes inside your finance crew totally. Automation makes a future potential the place real-time knowledge removes the necessity for an in depth—as you’re at all times present.
Software program as a Service (SaaS) companies that may have solely been in a position to forecast renewals quarterly can trend-spot in actual time, flagging materials adjustments.
Maybe most significantly, automating routine duties of assurance and accounting workflows frees up your finance crew to give attention to extra strategic actions.
Find out how to undertake automation for monetary processes
When you’re taking a look at getting automation going, listed here are some steps you may wish to take.
1. Perceive what sort of automation you want
Each enterprise is totally different, and it’s essential to get the perfect worth. It’s important to grasp what space of your funds may do most with automation.
You possibly can give attention to reconciliation, for instance, an enormous drain of assets for any finance workplace.
Reconciliation is a course of the place you have to match the entry within the checking account with the related bill in your system when you obtain a fee.
Why not automate reconciliation?
With some forms of financial management software, it’s potential to create guidelines the place common funds routinely get matched to their invoices.
Moreover, synthetic intelligence (AI) means you possibly can match up one-off or in any other case discrete funds.
In fact, somebody out of your crew will nonetheless must verify the reconciliation.
Nonetheless, there’s a substantial time and labour distinction between peering at two lists, matching issues up, and easily checking that an current reconciliation is appropriate.
Automation may permit you to import statements out of your monetary establishments and routinely reconcile them in minutes when managing your money.
You’d be capable to rapidly spot exceptions, handle financial institution errors, monitor for fraud, and keep correct money balances.
2. Develop a enterprise case
When taking a look at automation inside departments, it’s best to query how economically viable alternatives are.
You need to examine what the return on funding could be.
Get related stakeholders in from the departments in query and attempt to create a enterprise case.
3. Get administration buy-in
It is advisable get data straight from stakeholders on what they perceive in terms of automation and the way it will be capable to profit them.
You and different management crew members ought to assist the broader enterprise perceive what automation can do and the way it may make their working lives simpler, letting them give attention to extra important, much less repetitive duties.
4. Assist IT in organising the programs
The IT crew can present technical experience to make sure automation implementation runs easily and on the proper velocity.
The technical management wants to begin small with automation, get the enterprise used to the expertise, and increase it when it will get used to the adjustments.
With the cloud, your finance crew can grow to be extra agile and sooner, gaining efficiencies by way of the time you save by eradicating time-intensive handbook duties.
To extract worth from automation, will probably be as much as you to evaluate business fashions, have a look at the dangers, recognise and account for worth, and apply controls and governance.
5. Get outcomes
Create a transparent automation roadmap. You’ll must work carefully together with your folks, who will drive the usage of new expertise.
With the tech in place, you’ailing must work at measuring your progress and ask just a few questions of your finance crew:
- How are you utilizing automation, and are you doing it proper?
- How efficient are your new processes?
- Are they resulting in the productiveness and effectivity enhancements you count on?
- What outcomes do you see with the brand new expertise?
- How are you going to get enterprise metrics in your meant objectives?
AI forecasting the long run
Automation is a subcategory of AI that follows pre-programmed guidelines to run processes.
Nevertheless, we’re certain to see extra superior types of AI sooner or later as programs apply self-learning functionality by way of machine studying.
The long run will see forward-looking finance groups use knowledge science and AI to look into the long run, utilizing real-time insights and AI-powered forecasting.
At the moment, AI can assist help small companies with money circulation forecasting, whereas, as we’ve stated, bigger medium-sized SaaS companies in particular industries may use AI to forecast renewals.
Members of your finance groups can use AI to construct patterns of understanding, figuring out transactions flowing by way of the enterprise that don’t match these patterns—in actual time.
Your crew could have confidence when reviewing tons of of 1000’s of transactions a month. People can not overview all of that manually.
Aaron Harris, chief expertise officer at Sage, says: “The true worth in AI-powered forecasting isn’t that it’s extra correct than people; the actual energy is that AI can do it repeatedly, and principally without cost.”
Editor’s observe: This text was first revealed in Could 2022 and has been up to date for relevance.