Will It Automate? Financial Accounting processes to begin your automation journey
Take a look at four key business processes that can be automated—saving your employees valuable time, reducing human error, and increasing productivity.
Accounts Payable
Accounts Payable (AP) is a crucial part of any business, no matter how large or small. It’s important for the business to ensure they’re only paying legitimate and accurate bills and invoices, but it’s also important that suppliers and services are paid for properly and on-time to keep the business running as usual.
Simple yet redundant elements of this process, that can easily be automated, include the scanning, matching and paying of invoices.
What is the first step? Get a Capture Solution.
Once the invoices are captured, the system can then deliver documents and data for review, approval and coding in a workflow.
The entire process can also integrate with existing accounting and enterprise systems such as an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
What are the benefits of automating accounts payable?
The benefits of digitising and automating accounts payable are two-fold as they benefit both the internal finance department and the suppliers that you partner with.
The ease of an increased view of all incoming invoices, bills, and payment requests along with less time manually capturing and organising data will give your Finance department back valuable time in their days—especially during end of month.
Other benefits that can result of automating accounts payable include:
- Stronger relationships with key business partners
- Reduced costs and a more efficient finance team
- Reduced exposure to fraud
- Reduced human errors
Accounts Receivable
What would happen to your company if several of its major clients didn’t pay their invoices due to a human error in the invoicing system? Anyone who has spoken to a member of the Finance team knows how crucial visibility of accounts is during the month-end challenge.
While vital to the business, it doesn’t have to be the complex and time-consuming process. Automating this business process will protect your balances while making your Accounts team more efficient.
How Does it Work?
When order forms or purchase orders come into the finance team, the automated process captures the documents, validates the information, and delivers it to the back-end systems.
As payments come into the organisation, they are automatically captured, identified and data is extracted from remittances, checks and other relevant documents. All the data and information are validated, balancing remittance totals against check amounts and reconciling payments with open invoices.
Once all of this is done, accounting systems are automatically updated.
What are the benefits?
- Centralised information with easy access and audit trails
- Reduced operating costs
- Reduced data entry errors
- Manage disputes and collections more efficiently with instant access to information in a central location
- A reduction in the time taken to settle invoices by customers and improved compliance
- Can be applied to both digital and paper invoices, catering to your clients’ needs
To identify if your Financial team is ready for improvement, tell us and schedule a free assessment.