Automating Processes in Finance: Benefits & How it Works

Automated business processing has become a need for almost all of the companies nowadays. It is due to its high strategic procedures enabling smooth control to any business. It is now considered as one of the most powerful tools in business.

There are many things that have changed ever since the 90’s. In today’s era, the main goal is to maximize automation, not to re-engineer it. We are witnesses of the advancements in technology. We are also witnesses to its success in accelerating and revolutionizing cloud computation in business operations. The process has shifted, instead of ‘re-engineering’, it has now become ‘automation’.

Today, the demand for businesses to operate complicated and labor-intensive jobs have increased. Due to this, the main focus of businesses now is to automate the traditional and manual processes. Most of the business-owners abide to this trend because aside from its being easy to use, it also has many benefits. However, you need to thoroughly understand the benefits first as well as its difficulties.

But why do we need to consider automated business processes? What are its real and authentic benefits in business?

Studies from leading business journals, discusses the importance of automated finance procedures.

So, we have distilled those advantages of automated finances process into a comprehensive list below:

1. Cost Reduction

Almost all businesses face the global pressure of increasing their profit. One strategy to achieve this goal is to reduce or minimize the costs. However, minimizing the capabilities of your computer might negatively affect your entire company. The manual labors and tasks will be done one-at-a-time and usually performed at a slower rate. Doing things slower will highly increase your cost more and more. Automation lets you do things faster so you could accomplish more. It also allows you to utilize fewer resources.

Automation in finance is a wise strategy for cost reduction. It is a more intelligent approach to maximizing your quality service at a minimal cost. It is a great opportunity to satisfy your customer of their needs while systematically reducing your costs. Often times, the management disregards this potential for savings. Fortunately, many of the modern servers today even offer inexpensive operational costs for automated finance procedures.

2. Increased Productivity

As technology usage in companies demand productivity and growth, the responsibilities become bigger as well. Basically, like most other businesses, they are bound to be given tools that help in increasing the productivity and efficiency of the company. Information Technology and automated operations took the privilege of doing this. The conception of computer software productivity has produced substantial gains in the business field.

However, because of increasing computer accessibility, the workload for IT professionals had been increasing more and more as well. The rapid growth of technology made the widespread use of gadgets become easier and more accessible. It makes people become computer literate making them capable of finishing more tasks with less time.

The fact that many people are now using the computer also places higher demands on the system. More computer users are producing more jobs. The printed output highly increased in spite of efforts in reducing printed reports. Despite of the fad to automate transaction-oriented business and server systems, heap of workloads still continue to grow. There are still production tasks that consume majority of the computer usage time. This is why if you do not automate the finance procedures of your company, you won’t be able to keep up with the fast changing business world. You will be stuck with the traditional slower approach in business. And for this, increased productivity may not occur thus hampering your company’s growth.

3. Reliability

We have known earlier that productivity is one of the obvious benefits we can achieve from automation. However, reliability is also a real gem. It sparkles brightly with automation. It is one of the foundations of any good IT procedures department. It helps you clear chaos, confusion, and unsatisfied users in your finance company. This department needs two skill sets: First, an individual who can operate with high technical skills and ability to thoroughly comprehend the intricacy of the procedural system. The person should be able to solve and analyze problems as they emerge. Second, the same person should also have the patience to push buttons and load papers from time to time.

Let’s face the reality, off-shift operations can be some of the most repetitive, error-prone, and boring task of any company. However, by removing human factor and shifting into automation, you will be able to eliminate much of the procedural errors.
Automation in finance processes ensures that the tasks are not forgotten. You can be assured that it won’t run out of the queue. It helps secure that the prerequisite tasks are accomplished successfully, that data input are all correct, and urgent procedures are carefully performed.

Automation can handle complicated jobs intelligently and dynamically based on their predefined parameters. These would enormously benefit your company since these functions and operations are reliably executed by your automated software. It also relieves your personnel from tedious and boring hours of manual tasks.

4. Quality and Consistency

If your company is able to deliver high quality products and services consistently, it may result in happy, satisfied, and long-term customers. Automation ensures that each task is performed carefully and identically, which usually ends up in high quality and reliable outcomes. Since automation performs identically with its programmed system, it tends to deliver the same level of service and experience from your company. If you have served them with high quality, you should be continually doing that. This will guarantee your customers quality and consistency.

5. Improved Efficiency

Efficiency is defined by the extent to which effort, time, and cost is efficaciously applied for its intended purpose or task. Automated processes reduce the time needed to accomplish a given task, the required effort to undertake it, and the cost of successfully completing it. Automation does not only guarantee making your systems run smoothly and effectively. It also eliminates your errors while ensuring that your best services and practices are maintained at constant leverage. Shifting from manual processes to automated ones helps your finance team to equalize all of your existing functions. Thankfully, the things slowing you and your company down can now be replaced by reliable and efficient automated processes.

6. Data Integrity

You might have hired the best personnel to have a finance team in your company. But, they are susceptible to many things beyond the bounds of their control. Difficult suppliers, minor mistakes, and even the changing of policies make it difficult to maintain precise information. However, if you have automated data forms, you can rest assured that you have the right numbers and no manual errors. Having no errors in all your finance-related data should be something that must be deemed indispensable. This will help you build an image with reliable data integrity, improving the worth and credibility of your company.

7. Better Performance

Most companies wanted their businesses performing like a thoroughbred. In reality, it tends to be burdened with too much work. Although technological advancements made them perform faster and more efficiently in terms of costs. But, the demand for automated infrastructure procedures to be able to keep up with the advancing trend is getting higher each year. Thus, the expectation to exceed to different levels of capabilities of your company had been increasing every year too. Companies are now forced to improve their system for a more suitable performance.

There are two options on how to improve your system. First is to update your hardware. Second is to purchase a newer and more reliable system. Both are expensive choices.
However, there are also websites that provide you assistance on automating the systems procedures of your finance company. Companies such as Salesforce offers you services such as Salesforce consulting services, Salesforce quick start implementation, and most especially Salesforce CRM implementation. Customer Relationship Management or CRM is not to be ignored. It is a strategy that focuses on your customers. One of its goals is to increase customer retention and develop positive relationship with your customers. Improving your customer relationship usually tend to have a significant impact on the holistic performance of your company.

8. Improved Availability

Finance companies have become more dependent on computers these days. Every day business is regularly conducted using automated systems. These automated systems are applied and implemented in making reservations, order entry, shipping orders and assembly instructions -to name a few. If there are no computers in your company, your business is more likely to suffer.

Decades ago, it is still acceptable for businesses not to have a computer. However, today, not having one may tarnish the reputation of your company. With the large volume of cloud computation, the outage of essential functions may cost heavy loss on your revenue.

An automated process can be a big help of ensuring the availability of your system. A disk drive might crash from time to time and it will be a serious problem if there are no adequate backups available. An essential advantage of automation is its ability to autosave and recover your systems. This will ensure your protection from any potential of disk loss disaster or circumstantial system damage and unavailability due to human error.

9. Faster Approvals

Automated approval system helps you save as much as nine hours per work week either for a reimbursement claim or a budget approval. This will be an added advantage for your finance. Aside from speedy transactions and fast approvals, it will also eliminate those bulky email threads that constantly checks the status of your customer’s requests.

10. Metric Visibility

Well-maintained success of your business highly depends on the development and implementation of your exceptional strategy. Securing your competency advantage requires you to constantly observe, determine, and reform that strategy. All of these will greatly contribute to an accessible, precise, and timely business data. Automation processes are often controlled by predetermined work flows. These work flows consistently function accurately on your designated timeline. It depends on you which procedures you want to automate. Automation can be used in billing, financial, collection, sales or support. It can record the vital metrics and it also provides you reports with the essential information needed. If your systems are all interconnected, you get a clear and complete image of your finances. By doing so, it is easier to comprehend the logic behind the financial fluctuations which can assist you on making faster and wiser business decisions for your company.

Traditional system is not working anymore. It is not enough to sustain the needs of this fast-changing world. If you are still using a traditional accounting system, tasks such as balance sheets can become a pain in the neck if you wanted perfect execution. Each line may contain hundreds or even thousands of transactions. Imagine recording it manually on spreadsheets by a pressured personnel.

What’s worse is that this bulk of transactions and information needs to be done every end of the month. For this reason, it will be an enormous workload with restricted and tight deadlines. It seems almost impossible for humans to attain it without errors. The outcomes are prone to the disorderliness of manual error, misleading reports, and chaotic calculations just because of one single basic mistake on a monthly expenses spreadsheet. Imagine how much damage it would take to have multiple and major errors on two or more spreadsheets?

So, how important is the role of automation on your finance? It is extremely vital for your business to survive.

It does not mean you need to hire robots in place of people when we mean automating your finance and system. It is just an exaggerated misconception. In truth, automation is serving as a supplementary solution in today’s elevating financial issues. It helps you improve productivity and efficiency in your existing financial system.

In addition to that, tons of insights are needed to consider before making decisions especially on your finances. However, we cannot deny the fact that automation plays a major role in finance. There are loads of benefits from your management’s perspective, availability, reliability, productivity, performance, cost reduction and more. These are some of the powerful factors you need to scrutinize for adapting automation on your system.

But before attaining these benefits, you must have the discipline of overcoming obstacles first. More likely these obstacles won’t interrupt your plans for as long as you comprehend, anticipate, and stabilize them along with the possible benefits of automated system.