Automation in Accounting and Finance Fields

Accounting and finance tasks like journal entries, account reconciliation, and budget creation are usually strenuous and time-consuming. As your business grows, the requirement of managing the daily flow of expenses also increases, requiring valuable time and effort from your finance team. While this is not bad, the more time your finance team spends copying and pasting between spreadsheets, the less productive they will be. This is a significant reason for automation. Moving from the clunky manual finance process will improve performance, and allow your finance personnel focus on their core functions of analyzing and interpreting data.

What Is Automation?

Automation involves the use of technological tools to fasten and better accounting processes, in such a way that it requires little intervention.

It doesn’t mean hiring robots in place of humans. Instead, it is a process to help your finance team work faster and achieve more accurate results.

Visualization Using Different Software

One of the significant advantages of automation is that it connects all your systems and provides a complete picture of your financials. It makes your finance tasks more secure, giving you full traceability of every detail.

Some other benefits of automation include:

It Saves Time: With an automated accounting tool, your finance team will spend less time on various processes, allowing them to focus on critical strategic decisions.

Data Integrity: Automation reduces the likelihood of errors and mistakes. You may have a great team, but no one is above minor mistakes. Findings show that over 70% of manually generated excel sheets are error-prone.

Improved Efficiency: Automating your finance process creates greater consistency within the team. It smoothens existing functions and reduces the chances of mistakes.

Here are some accounting processes you can improve through automation:

Journal Entries

Manually creating and posting journals is one of the most demanding accounting procedures. They are created on spreadsheets that don’t validate key information, and this leaves loopholes for errors and fraud.

Fortunately, automation addresses all the inefficiencies associated with manual journal entries. It saves you cost and amplifies your journal entry procedure.

Automation tools are more efficient to delineate risk and manage your JE in a systematic and centralized fashion.

It also makes validation of data very simple. When executives or auditors notice any error, they can easily hunt the supporting document for validation.

Account Reconciliation

Reconciliation is a crucial aspect of the financial process. It is the foundation of effective business finance, and errors in the account reconciliation process can cost you money. Manual reconciliation takes hours to days to process, especially when you have to balance hundreds or thousands of accounts; and like most manual processes are also prone to human errors.

An efficient, timely, and effective reconciliation is possible in an automated environment. Automation software takes complex reconciliation and makes it faster and more efficient.

Not only will you be confident of the accuracy of your account reconciliations, but you will also be sure of complying with all applicable regulations.

Creating Budgets

Creating, managing, and tracking business expenditure is a daunting and time-consuming task, whether you are a small business or an enterprise. Budgeting is an essential aspect of business planning that is essential to attaining your goals.

In the lengthy manual process of collecting, analyzing, creating, disbursing, and merging data, there can be costly errors which can impact your overall business performance. There are also issues of data validation which can drag on for weeks.

Fortunately, automation simplifies the whole process and eradicates whatever challenges you may be facing. It brings about more transparency, improved accuracy, uniform, and flexible budget and faster validation and approvals.

Other accounting tasks that can be automated include:

• Book-keeping
• Account receivables
• Account payable
• Payroll
• Tax compliance
• Invoicing

Conclusively, automating your finance processes will eliminate errors and miscalculations. It will also save you money and improve performance and productivity.