Why is financial automation no longer just a "nice-to-have"?

Financial management processes must be carried out in accordance with laws and regulations and this is often a time and resource consuming activity. However, nowadays processes can be automated to a large extent, so it is worthwhile for companies to stop often enough to think about what they could do better.

• Where are the potential bottlenecks in the processes or where are the recurring errors?
• Are key financial processes, such as purchase invoice processing, working efficiently?
• Could the root 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 everything possible has already been done to automate financial management:

Key benefits of automating financial management processes

Reduction of errors: manual process steps can easily lead to errors, as we are all humans. 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 the financial data is definitely correct.

Saving time and money: financial management processes traditionally take up 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, a company can handle more complex transactions and scale its business better. By automating and streamlining process discovery bottlenecks, businesses can process larger volumes of data with fewer resources and higher quality.

Increasing transparency: errors in data quality caused by manual processing of financial management data, as well as possible delays in processing, cause problems in real-time and accurate reporting of data. Automated 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 an automation project start and will it be expensive?

The most appropriate way to implement automation (integrations, robots or even self-made applications) will be determined once the current state and the will is clear. Once the need has been identified and discussions with an automation expert have been opened, the process can begin.

The scale of the project affects the cost; for example, in the purchase invoice process it takes only a short time to examine a single task, but it can take up to two working days to fully dissect the process. Much depends on the size of the organization and the complexity of the cases.

The project itself often does not involve much work for the finance organization - the most common is a configuration meeting, access to the systems and help to verify the test results. The development proposals resulting from the project can be implemented on your own schedule.

Automation of financial management processes is slowly starting to become not just a "nice-to-have" but a prerequisite for business success. If your company has been thinking about automating processes, but how to get started or other details are still unclear, we would be happy to join you in these discussions.