If you’ve recently implemented or upgraded a new financial management system, increasing efficiency was likely among the list of reasons you did so. Upgrading your accounting software can reduce costs, improve your reporting and business operations, help your accounting staff before more productive, and much more, but once you’ve done that, there’s more you can do: automation.
While not all processes can be automated, there are many that can—and doing so will save your organization time and free up your staff to handle more complex functions. What makes your organization a good candidate for automation?
- You have a high volume of repetitive tasks. Think about all the manual tasks that your staff do over and over again. Those are ideal for automation! Examples include:
- Account reconciliations
- Journal entries
- Matching transactions (e.g., purchase orders to receipts)
- Invoice processing
- High-volume reconciliations
- You have numerous tasks that involve several people. High-touch processes get bogged down by the number of people involved, but automation can help keep things moving along. Approvals and handoffs are no longer stuck in people’s inboxes and errors are less likely to occur.
- You have many manual tasks that are taking too much time. If your A/P staff is buried in invoices and doesn’t have the time to gain any visibility into their function, errors are more likely to happen. That’s one example where hiring more people isn’t likely to fix your problems. Automation of your systems can free up your staff from spending time on those time-consuming processes so they can create better workflows and work smarter.
- Many of your processes are time sensitive. Honestly, what company doesn’t have time sensitive processes? But if you find many of your deadlines getting pushed or missed, automation is a good solution. Your system will know the dates and deadlines to optimize those payment terms, improve your vendor relationships and keep things moving as they need to.
- You need an audit trail. Your auditors need to understand your controls and processes, and when you automate some of the most predictable, repetitive ones, it makes their jobs easier—and your year-end audit too. Automation improves visibility through all your processes.
Automation has the power to streamline your business and empower your accounting team! With fewer tedious tasks on their plates, you’ll leverage their talent and enable them to do their jobs better. (Now, if you’re dealing with a legacy system that is outdated, that’s another problem…contact us to learn more about why you need to upgrade your accounting systems in 2022 and how we can guide you through it).
We’ll say it again: automation is essential to your business and can help your accounting and finance staff start thinking more strategically. In addition, automation can lead to…
- Reduced costs
- Fewer errors in tasks that are prone to mistakes
- Increased profit visibility
- Standardized processes/more even workload among your staff members
- Improved compliance
- Happier employees.
If you need better processes and would like to streamline them for cost savings and efficiency, let’s talk automation. Contact our Financial Systems Consulting Manager to discuss your needs: [email protected]
