Imagine a month-end for the finance team where everything goes according to plan and automation takes care of the most repetitive manual tasks. No urgent Slack notifications, no stress, just smooth processes.
In most companies, month-end isn’t like that. Finance teams often find themselves overwhelmed by rising expectations coupled with inefficient workflows, tools, and processes. A recent study by ProcessMaker found that the average finance employee makes over 1,000 copy-and-pastes per week and spends 50% of their time on repetitive tasks.
Financial process automation addresses this challenge and enables companies to automate their financial processes and improve efficiency. This article presents essential information for finance leaders, covering the benefits, opportunities, and challenges associated with financial process automation.
What is Business Process Automation?
Process automation is the use of technology to automate hotels and motels email list repetitive or manual tasks to increase efficiency and save time. In the finance function, automating financial processes helps streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve decision-making.
Simply put, financial process automation is about eliminating unnecessary work in your financial processes, but what’s wrong with financial processes in the first place?
Among the challenges regularly recognized, we can cite:
Inefficient processes . Many financial tasks are still performed manually, leading to huge sunk costs and difficulties in maintaining efficient processes.
Too much repetitive work . Finance operations still have many repetitive tasks and processes. Finance teams waste about 10% of their time in chair-spinning processes , logging in and copying information from one system to another.
Slow approvals. Many financial processes rely on manual interventions, such as manager approvals, which poses challenges in terms of processing times and meeting deadlines.
Unreliable data and reporting . Many financial reports still rely on spreadsheets that aggregate data from various source systems, leading to inconsistencies and inaccuracies.