The modern finance manager's toolbox includes a number of tools that can make everyday routines easier. One of the most important tasks a CFO should be concerned with is ensuring that the company's financial management processes are as efficient and secure as possible.
Financial processes must be carried out in accordance with laws and regulations, and this is often a time-consuming and resource-intensive activity. However, processes can be automated to a large extent, so it is worthwhile for companies to stop often enough to think about what they could be doing better.
- Where are the potential bottlenecks in the processes or where are the recurring errors?
- Are key financial processes, such as the processing of purchase invoices, working efficiently?
- Could the causes of potential challenges lie elsewhere in the organisation than in financial management?
Tomi Paapio, Head of Automation Services at Greenstep, shared his tips for CFOs who are wondering if they have done everything possible when it comes to finance automation:
Key benefits of financial process automation
Reducing errors: Manual processes can easily lead to errors, as we are all human. Typos, double entries, missing transactions or incorrect calculations can have serious consequences. Automation removes the possibility of human error from the equation and ensures that financial data is accurate.
Saving time and money: Financial management processes traditionally take a lot of time and resources, especially when there are multiple data sources. Automation streamlines processes, including the automatic collection of data from multiple systems through integrations. Automating invoicing and purchase accounting can easily save several hours of work per week.
Increase productivity and efficiency: By automating core financial processes, an organisation can handle more complex transactions and better scale its business. By automating and streamlining bottlenecks in process discovery, organisations can process larger volumes of data with fewer resources and higher quality.
Improve transparency: Data quality errors caused by manual processing of financial management data, as well as potential delays in processing, create problems for real-time and accurate reporting of data. Automating integration, processing and export of data, for example to a comprehensive BI tool, ensures that management and other key people in the company always have access to timely and accurate information to make better decisions.
Where does a finance automation project start and will it be expensive?
The most appropriate way to implement finance automation (integrations, robots or even self-made applications) is determined once the current state and the will are clear. Once the need has been identified and discussions have begun with an automation expert, the process can begin.
The scale of the project will affect the cost; for example, in the purchase invoice process it takes a short time to review a single task, but it can take up to two working days to fully dissect the process. Much depends on the size of the organisation and the complexity of the cases.
The project itself often does not involve much work for the finance organisation - the most common is a configuration meeting, access to the systems and help in reviewing the test results. The development proposals resulting from the project can be implemented on your own schedule.
The financial process automation is slowly beginning to move from being a "nice-to-have" to a requirement for business success. If your company has been thinking about finance automation, but how to get started or other details are still unclear, we would be happy to join you in these discussions.
Published 07.02.2024