Finance management and accounting are indeed the toughest and stressful jobs in terms of work pressure and deadlines. Even the finest professional accountant gets tired and low due to keeping up with the endlessly flowing data. It takes a lot of patience, potential, mental strength, pressure handling ability, and mainly commitment to work for long periods, managing the daily flow of an organization’s expenses.
Record keeping and other financial tasks require much more than complicated maths. The accountant needs to handle spreadsheets controlled by stakeholders, floating exchange rates, changing international financial standards. They even need to have the skill of spontaneous and strategic decision making.
The best solution to all of this tiresome work is the automation of finance and accounting services. One must realize the advantages of automating financial management to get the best out of it.
What is finance automation?
Finance automation uses software to automate the main financial objectives like data entries, reconciliation of accounts, etc. It helps in preparing financial statements with less human involvement. Doing these tasks manually takes a very long time. Automation helps you save energy as well and time. This process is transparent, arranged, organized, and repeatable.
Effects of automation in finance and accounting services
- The financial forms can be pre-filled with necessary data attained from a common database.
- The manual work of data transferring, etc., can be set up with system integration.
- Instead of relying on a person for financial business processes, it can be automatically done through automation.
- It frees up the finance executives from the burden of making strategic and complex decisions.
- It helps in improving accuracy and nullify errors. Many professionals rely on error-prone spreadsheets.
How does finance automation help you?
The mapping process in finance and accounting services terminates the challenging procedures and performs all the stressful tasks for you.
Here are a few benefits of automation in finance and accounting services:
- Data integrity
Changing policies, minor errors, difficult suppliers are some factors that make accurate data maintenance hard even though you have the best finance team. So, if your data is automated, your data is accurate with no manual errors.
- Improved Efficiency
It smoothens the work of finance and accounting services. All the works can be replaced by the automation process.
- Speedy Approvals
It will reduce at least 8 hours of working time. The automatic approval of reimbursement claims, etc., can be done within no time. You can also be free from checking the status of each request regularly.
- 360-Degree Visibility
When you are connected to all the systems, you can get the full knowledge of your financials, which helps you make better and faster business decisions.
How to automate your finance and accounting services
Few prerequisites must be taken care of before automating your financial processes:
- Standardize Your Financial Processes
Before displaying data on a digital platform, sketch down the workflow, and create a whiteboard to help you look at the areas where you need amendments and streamline tasks. Taking opinions from stakeholders on what changes can be done is also essential.
- Create a Digital Form and Workflow
Keeping the sequencing, conditional tasks, and how to assign people various tasks dynamically in mind, create a workflow and customize it to make it useful for your team.
- Integrate with Other Software
After automation of various financial processes, ensure that the communication and sharing activities are performed smoothly by your systems. Tools that can be easily integrated must be taken into consideration. Third-party applications can help connecting tools.
Why isn’t the traditional approach working?
Other than automation, the R2R model is used in finance that covers objectives from record to report. Perfection cannot be attained while making balance sheets. The executives have to manually record and represent hundreds and thousands of transactions on spreadsheets, which is time-consuming and error-prone.
So, what is the role of automation in finance and accounting services?
Adapting to finance automation in finance and accounting services doesn’t mean replacing robots in place of experts. It is indeed a big misconception that automation is leading to the endangering of jobs. Automation is just an auxiliary solution that helps in doing effective and error-free work. In financial approvals, the insurance companies can know how risky a client is after incorporating their loan history and credit scores and then make automated payout decisions.
