Reports suggest that businesses who automate their most information-intensive processes can cut costs by up to 90%.

The drive to digitisation is also giving organisations instant access to business-critical data and improved end-to-end visibility thanks to enhanced control.

But where do you start?

Here are five areas your business can prioritise for digital transformation:

1. Accounts payable

Late payment penalties soon mount up, and early payment discounts can be missed if your business is unable to process invoices quickly.

With digitisation, you’ll automate one of the most time consuming manual business processes and gain immediate financial return. Your business will also enjoy less exposure to fraud and far better relations with key suppliers and partners.

2. Accounts receivable

Cash management was found as the most prized benefits of digital transformation during a recent study by the Institute of Financial Operations.

An automated accounts receivable operation will operate more strategically by reducing the time taken to settle invoices and improving compliance, thus giving frontline sales staff more time to focus on delivering value and prospecting.

3. Human resources

When pension scheme advisor Towers Watson digitised the work required to review a regulatory issue, they cut the time taken to manually do the job from 1,000 man hours to just 20 hours.

HR teams have an unenviable task sifting through the vast amounts of employee data now available, but as the figures above prove, digitisation makes the process far easier, while also helping businesses reduce storage needs and improve compliance.

4. Contract management

The Institute for Supply Management found that the average Fortune 1000 company retained between 20,000 and 40,000 current contractual files.

Clearly, processing such voluminous information manually is neither time- nor cost-effective. Equally, the potential for human error means such organisations can never be fully confident of full protection from legal disputes.

With an automated solution, such concerns would no longer be apparent and nor would the business be at risk of commercial disadvantage purely because of an unmanageable wealth of contractual documentation.

5. The mailroom

Mail now reaches businesses via a variety of channels, be it email, paper, via fax or from sources such as mobile devices.

Digitisation will deliver efficiencies that directly impact your business’s bottom line by ensuring information reaches the intended destination quickly and in a more actionable form - no matter its source. Compliance risk will in turn be reduced, and errors cut, due to less of a requirement for manual intervention.

But that’s not all, because a digital mailroom also enables documents to be securely stored and reduces the chances of anything being lost.

Further insight

You can find out more about digitising and automating your business for maximum benefit by downloading our eBook, ‘Digital Transformation Roadmap – The 5 Priority Business Functions’.