Finance Automation

Automation in finance refers to the use of technology to carry out operations with little or no human involvement. Not that robots are used to take the place of people. It simply refers to automating time-consuming, repetitive manual processes. Finance departments may focus their attention on adding value and advancing strategy by automating these processes. Finance automation's main objective is to increase process efficiency by minimizing or eliminating monotonous jobs or operations that don't provide value. When it comes to establishing business process excellence, automation is essential.

How is It Beneficial?

• Decreases Error: By automating data gathering, it is possible to have complete insight into all the moving parts of the finance pipelines, such as contracts, invoices, and vendor data, without having to switch between several programs or manually sort the data.
• Brings Transparency to the Financial Process: Gathers data and offers complete visibility into all the moving parts of finance pipelines, such as contracts, invoices, and vendor information, without requiring users to switch between different applications or manually sort through data. Streamline and Quicken Approval Processes The automation of finance procedures prevents evaluations and approvals from becoming a bottleneck. Increases Effectiveness Utilise dashboards to evaluate potential bottleneck sources and gauge how well processes are performing.
• Improves Cooperation: Make it simple for anyone to submit a request, and make tracking, viewing, and reporting even simpler. Your operations will be more consistent thanks to customized form fills, and you'll have less to worry about every day thanks to triggered emails and notifications.

Examples of Automation in Finance

Accounts payable: Typically, an accounts payable department uses a number of manual procedures, including:

• prior to granting payment, making sure that invoices are properly approved
• ensuring enough money is available for each payment
• Following different payment terms from vendor to vendor

Finance automation software takes care of these operations by integrating your accounts payable system directly with purchase or reimbursement workflows to ensure that you only handle approved invoices.

Purchasing and Procurement: Due to the ad hoc nature of many purchase requests, purchase requisitions sometimes contain inaccurate, missing, or incomplete information. Typical issues include:

• Due to unplanned orders and purchases made outside of the firm’s procurement process, there is a lack of expenditure control and visibility.
• Unstructured request forms, manual data entry, or receiving requests through numerous channels can all lead to incomplete or erroneous data.
• Issues with contract compliance that appear when a finance department has to look at the contracts of several providers

By adopting finance automation software to standardize the development of purchase requests, define purchasing criteria, required activities, and automation rules that assure policy compliance when processing purchasing requests, you may avoid these problems. If you are interested in Finance and want to explore this topic and more, check our Finance training programs