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Finance trends shift fast—explore 5 key processes & tips to stay ahead.
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Trends in finance processes change as often as CFOs check their dashboards. This guide takes a look at five key finance processes, offering a step-by-step breakdown of the latest trends and best practices to stay ahead of the curve.
Automation for financial services differs from other business areas due to a higher level of caution and concern. Although a large majority of Americans rely on algorithms for directions, interest in—and trust in—automation within the financial sector remains relatively low.
That said, it’s challenging to ignore the statistics of success when it comes to automating financial operations. Finance leaders in various industries believe automation is improving their function’s efficiency and giving staff more time for value-added tasks.
Finance AI adoption in 2025 is consistent with last year [58%], with 59% of finance leaders reporting the use of AI in their finance function.
So, you see? While consumer trust may lag, adoption within finance teams continues to grow. This disconnect highlights the importance of understanding precisely what finance automation is and how your business can implement it today.
What is Finance Automation?
Finance automation is the use of artificial intelligence (including AI agents) to streamline and execute manual financial tasks more efficiently and cost-effectively. It encompasses setting up a series of tasks (called workflows) and using technology to trigger predefined steps. This means aspects of the accounting process can be entirely handled without human intervention.
This finance transformation is about digitizing as many jobs as possible, while still maintaining agility and a high level of quality. The finance automation market for businesses across industries is growing, as indicated by the following statistic.
The global market for Financial Automation was valued at US$8.1 Billion in 2024 and is projected to reach US$18.4 Billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 14.6% from 2024 to 2030.
Research and Markets’ 2025 Financial Automation – Global Strategic Business Report.
This implies that automation in finance is no longer a distant possibility but a reality. And it’s growing rapidly.
Watch: Finance Automation Explained (Video Guide)
Now that you’ve seen how automation accelerates accuracy, efficiency, and insight, let’s break down the core technologies, starting with the shift from traditional RPA to modern AI agents.
The Rise of AI in Finance: From RPA to Agents
AI in finance for automation is progressing from RPA (robotic process automation) to AI agents. RPA has traditionally been the software tool used to automate routine manual processes. AI agents are autonomous software functions that require less human input and make decisions to achieve goals in a perceptible environment.
RPA laid the groundwork, but todayʼs finance and executive leaders are adopting smarter, self-improving systems. AI agents are enabling CFOs to proactively flag issues, support faster close, and reach other goals, such as improving accuracy, scale, and insight.
Pro Tip: Want a deeper look at how AI agents are reshaping modern finance?
Explore how leading organizations are applying finance AI to improve accuracy, speed, and decision-making in our article, AI in Finance: What It Means for Teams, Compliance, and Growth.
Which Processes Should Be Automated?
The first step to using finance and invoice automation is segregating the duties that can be automated and require little to no human intervention. Although some processes feel complex, with a little financial planning, your automation journey can include these financial services:
Accounts Payable
Failing to pay your debts on time can lead to strained vendor relationships, late payments, and missed discounts. It’s all-around bad news for your reputation. Automation ensures that a business pays its bills on time while earning more early payment discounts, reducing costs, increasing accuracy, improving controls, and scaling for business volume, expansion, and complexity.
For recurring payments, AP can simply set the date and amount and let the AI-driven software do the rest. If you need automatic reminders sent for payment, this can be set up as well.
Invoice capture, coding, approval, and payment tasks can all be automated with finance AI. Smart OCR (optical character recognition) using an AI agent and machine learning. This technology scans an invoice and extracts data to capture it. It converts the image to text that can be processed through AP software.
Mass Payments
Automating global mass payouts is a crucial finance automation process that enhances on-time payments and payee satisfaction, ultimately reducing churn.
Your business may be making global payouts to other creators, streamers, affiliates, influencers, publishers, and independent contractors for royalties.
Purchase Order Solutions
Automate procurement processes, payment reconciliation, and spending to facilitate purchase order management. No more fumbling over spreadsheets for expenses and purchase orders.
Many finance automation software platforms issue virtual credit cards that sync directly with accounting, allowing CFOs to know exactly what they have purchased and who spent how much.
Procurement
Procurement automation will assist your employees with purchase requisition intake, providing stakeholders with visibility and enabling automated approval routing before automatically creating purchase orders (POs) from approved PRs.
Reporting and Analysis
One of the top finance functions to benefit from automation is running consistent reports for in-depth analysis. The more you digitize this process, the easier it is to make fast business decisions, with real-time data. Set reports to be delivered to specific staff, via certain channels, at different times of the day. You can also include numerous reports in a single email.
Automated finance analysis tools that offer APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) enable a business to consolidate all critical financial data from its connected applications and systems.
The dashboard then tracks KPIs using existing data to showcase things like:
- Departmental performance
- Account status
- Expenses
- Cash flow
- MRR
- Conversion
- And more…
Once you set it up, reports can be delivered to your inbox on a predictable schedule.
Tax Solutions
Tax solutions can greatly benefit from finance automation, encompassing tax form collection and TIN matching, as well as tax and withholding calculations and 1099 reporting.
Automation also enhances big data collection, giving finance professionals more accurate insights without the manual effort. With automated workflows, data entry becomes a thing of the past.
Today, there are multiple types of scanning technology for every document involved in the accounting process. This includes paperwork like:
- Receipts
- Invoices
- Bills
- Packing slips
- 1099s, VATs, and other contractor forms
These tools will extract all the data and put it into a searchable, scannable format. When tax season rolls around, all your documents are uploaded and organized to save your accounting team time.
Payroll
Payroll remains one of the least automated areas of finance. In fact, HR.com’s Future of Payroll 2025 report notes that only about two-fifths (39%) of organizations say their payroll functions are automated to a high or very high extent, while another 39% report only moderate automation. This gap highlights a significant opportunity for finance teams to streamline payroll operations.
With finance automation built into your ERP, businesses can set payment schedules by employee class and let the system handle the rest. Common payroll tasks that can be digitized include:
- Adding employees and their banking information
- Setting wages, rates, and classifications
- Automating processing cycles
- Updating payroll details without disrupting pay runs
By automating these workflows, organizations reduce manual effort, minimize errors, and ensure payroll runs smoothly and consistently.
Accounts Receivable
A business must stay on top of the money owed to it by customers. This is particularly important if you’re providing ongoing goods or services.
Finance automation can involve the following AR tasks:
- Recurring invoices: Your customers automatically receive invoices generated on a pre-set schedule.
- Overdue payment reminders: The customer receives an automated reminder when an invoice is past due.
- Recurring credit card payments: The customer’s credit card payment is automatically processed on a predictable schedule.
You can also send automated messages encouraging customers to pay online and open up a self-service portal. Then there’s no need to manually input payment data, customer information, or invoicing.
Preparing Your Finance Team for Global, AI-Driven Operations
Future-ready finance teams rely on automation to unify global operations, strengthen controls, and deliver real-time insight. Explore how AI-driven workflows streamline complexity and create a more resilient financial foundation.
How to Set Up Finance Automation
Follow these steps to automate your selected accounting processes with finance automation.
- Identify Your Current Processes
- Evaluate Your Existing Setup
- Assign a Stakeholder
- Set up Workflows
- Test the Workflows
1) Identify Your Current Processes
To start, figure out which of your accounting processes you want to automate. Not every task is built for automation, so consider tasks like:
- Repetitive and frequent jobs that an employee is doing
- Don’t require a high level of personal connection or human touch
- Don’t involve a lot of mental energy or creativity
Jot down anything that meets these criteria and pick one as the top priority. Don’t attempt to automate everything at once.
For example, maybe your team spends too much time sending past-due reminders. In this case, you’ll want to tackle automating notifications to replace human effort.
2) Evaluate Your Existing Setup
Look at the systems your business already has in place. Automation relies on technology and collaborative programs.
Dedicated automation platforms have recently hit the market to connect all your systems before you automate. These platforms will link together existing apps and enable them to “talk” to each other:
- Zapier
- Kissflow
- IFTTT
- Nutrient Workflow Automation Platform (formerly Integrify)
3) Assign a Stakeholder
Even though an automated process will run on its own, it’s still a wise idea to assign an individual or team to maintain the workflows and streamline operations.
Have someone oversee the process as the “point person” to ensure everything is running smoothly and address any errors as they occur.
4) Set up Workflows
Here’s the part where you roll up your sleeves and get to work. During the automation process, establishing workflows is key, as they will guide the technology moving forward.
Each workflow should have the following:
Trigger
This is the first domino in the line. It’s a predefined event that kickstarts the automation.
Example: An invoice is received, payment is past due, or a document needs approval
Action
What happens in response to the trigger
Example: A reminder email is sent, an SMS is triggered, etc.
Result
The intended goal of the trigger.
Example: The customer clicks the link in the reminder email and pays their bill.
This is a simple workflow. Some automated workflows can have several triggers and resulting actions. It simply relies on what you are trying to do and the goal you want to accomplish.
5) Test the Workflows
Once you have everything set up, it’s time to test the workflows to ensure they work properly. This will give the finance team some added peace of mind when they step away from the AI agents to focus on more valuable work.
The Key Benefits of Finance Automation
Financial process automation provides operational improvement tied to business outcomes. It’s not just a time-saver. Automating any business process has its advantages, but the benefits of finance and accounts payable automation create a unique opportunity for a full digital transformation.
Why have intelligent finance agents, AI assistants, and automation become such a high area of focus across industries? Let’s take a look at some of the impressive advantages of finance automation:
1. Increase Operational Efficiency
One of the largest benefits of finance automation is how much time a business can save. It creates a leaner supply chain with tighter controls.
Digitizing common workflows means less time spent on tasks like data entry, bookkeeping, and other manual processes.
Increase the finance team’s leverage through automation. It allows you to optimize your schedule and dedicate extra time to business development. It empowers teams to think strategically and turn raw data into actionable insight.
2. Reduce Errors
Data entry is prone to human error, and it can have dire consequences in finance. Especially if you don’t notice the mistake until journal entries are thrown off. The same can be said for when AP forgets a bill, or it ends up buried on someone’s desk for approval.
These are simple human errors that don’t happen when you digitize processes. AI agents never forget to pay anything. Reliable and tested workflows mean tasks are handled consistently and by the book—every time. Automated financial processes are at work, even when you aren’t.
3. Improve Compliance
With finance automation, your business can reduce compliance risk while improving the speed of execution. AP automation automates global regulatory compliance for payments and simplifies tax compliance. It collects tax forms upfront during supplier onboarding and automatically matches TINs to reduce the risk of fraudulent suppliers and IRS penalties.
4. Ensure Consistency
Whenever you have more than one person performing a business task, things get done slightly differently. Everyone has their own way of doing things, even with standards in place.
Finance automation ensures consistency every step of the way. Computers perform the same tasks, in the same way, every time.
Different approaches and perspectives don’t cause any time-consuming snags. With predefined steps in place, shared services are done the same way across all departments, tasks, teams, and customers.
5. Empower Teams
You want your finance people to be more than number crunchers. Every employee adds value when you remove tedious work. Finance talent is capable of much more than manual data entry.
Automation empowers teams to think strategically and turn raw data into actionable insights. This technology enables leaders in finances to better:
- Understand and challenge business strategy
- Offer effective solutions with better decision-making
- Build stronger business relationships
- Ensure reporting, accounting, and controllership are optimized
Freeing up teams to focus on strategy creates more room for growth and upward mobility. It practically guarantees a happier and more productive finance team.
6. Extract Insights
Finance automation enables more accurate reporting and provides in-depth and actionable insights. When you remove data entry, the information tends to be cleaner. Today’s smart finance tools connect all of your applications and display data in one place.
Not only does this streamline your data sources, but it also allows people to spend more time analyzing information, rather than gathering it.
Even with highly detailed reports, you still need an accounting professional to convert them into game-changing action plans. Finance automation gives your staff the time to use the data more effectively.
With automation in finance department processes such as accounts payable, team members can generate instant custom reports from conversational AI queries.
7. Drive Smarter Business Decisions
Your company gains real-time visibility, insights, and time availability through the automation of finance, enabling it to make smarter business decisions. Businesses can add strategic and operational improvement projects to enable better business results and reduce costs.
Risks of Finance Automation
Despite the growing success of finance automation, there are occasions in which it may not be the best fit for a business process. Consider these examples of common risks in automation:
Compliance
Automation errors can reduce the accuracy of regulatory reports. This means a business can risk fines, sanctions, and even legal recourse. Using the best finance automation system with human oversight can actually reduce errors and mitigate these risks.
Technology
Poorly designed smart workflows can impact your IT infrastructure. Additionally, routine IT maintenance can affect automation solutions.
Talent
Morale may suffer when automation is introduced because it is often misunderstood. Communication with employees must focus on higher-level work so they don’t worry about losing their jobs.
Reporting
Poorly implemented finance automation can result in inaccurate or incomplete reports, restatement, and reputational damage. A business must make sure automation is set up correctly in the first place to prevent this from happening down the road.
Operations
Badly designed automation solutions can slow down operations and increase processing errors. Lack of effective oversight or negligence of systems will lead to operational inefficiencies.
A business needs thought change management, strong internal controls, consistent oversight, and software (such as Tipalti) with well-built, embedded AI agents and a digital AI assistant to properly introduce AI-powered finance automation.
Real World Applications
Tipaltiʼs AP automation software integrates seamlessly with ERP and accounting systems to simplify every step of the payables process—from supplier onboarding and invoice processing to approvals and global payments with instant, automated payment reconciliation.
Tipalti AI Assistant and AI Agents deliver real-time spend insights and autonomously handle repetitive finance tasks, helping teams work faster and focus on strategic priorities. For multi-entity ERP environments like NetSuite, Tipalti offers seamless multi-entity integration and centralized control.
Is Finance Automation for You?
As with any strategic initiative, trying to find shortcuts to finance automation is unwise. A lot of time and attention must be invested in change management for intelligent finance agents to reach their fullest potential. It should be emphasized to staff that this is an enhancement to operations, not a means of replacing them.
Why Finance Automation Still Needs Human Insight
As automation evolves, it continues to improve the accuracy of financial analysis and forecasting. Artificial intelligence should be viewed as a positive net motivator that will make everyone’s job a little easier, but will not eliminate the need for strategic human efforts.
Digitizing finance processes requires a combination of AI agents with other intelligent automation technologies.
Organizations should translate business objectives into a secure-by-design AI-agent concept with explicit ownership, least-privilege access, clear autonomy thresholds, and hard ethical boundaries.
BCG (Boston Consulting Group)
AI-powered finance automation can scrutinize calls to detect deception, uncover hidden sentiment, and draw conclusions that inform investment decisions.
How the C-Suite Leverages Finance Automation for Strategic Growth
Today is the future of finance. The C-suite is embracing automation, making finance leaders and CFOs the most trusted source for data insights and cross-departmental collaboration. CFOs now play a crucial role in guiding a business toward digitally enabled growth.
In a high-growth business, every operation is tied to investment versus reward. That includes finance.
Tipalti Powers Finance Automation at Scale
Tipalti software is AI-powered finance automation that uses intelligent finance agents and a Tipalti AI Assistant. Tipalti goes beyond RPA with intelligent workflows that reduce errors, AI-driven fraud monitoring, and real-time payment status tracking.
Tipalti finance automation enables your business to scale its financial operations efficiently without headcount strain. You can create a future-ready finance infrastructure that delivers a competitive advantage and improves business results.
Tipalti’s AP automation and mass payments software products provide these differentiating features:
- Multi-entity features with your compatible ERP
- Self-service supplier or payee onboarding
- Tax ID validation using AI rulesets
- Payments to 200+ countries and territories in 120+ currencies with 50 payment methods
- Automated global payments regulatory compliance (e.g., OFAC sanctions screening, KYC, AML)
- Built-in global tax compliance (e.g., IRS, DAC7, HMRC, CRA)
Tipalti innovates by continually introducing new software features for your procurement and finance organizations. For example, read about the 2025 Tipalti Finance Automation Suite Updates. Tipalti embeds the generative AI product, ChatGPT, for finance applications.
After your application is approved, the Tipalti Card enables your business to better control employee spending on non-PO items with a corporate card and earn cash rewards for that spending.
Tipalti Customer Testimonials
Serving 5,000+ businesses, Tipalti has a 99% customer retention rate, as evidenced by its customer testimonials. For more details, click the linked Tipalti customers’ case studies.
PubMatic
We’re saving massive amounts of time and have increased financial controls. With the Tipalti and NetSuite integration, we’ve streamlined as much as possible.
Jason Wechsler, VP Revenue Accounting and Finance Automation, PubMatic
Symphonic
We serve hundreds of thousands of clients—some in other countries, who need payment in local currency—and we’re paying them each month for earnings across 200 streaming platforms. That’s difficult enough, but when we added SplitShare, where every payment might be distributed to many collaborators, finance automation became a must-have.
Jorge Brea, Founder and CEO, Symphonic
Together, these stories demonstrate how Tipalti empowers organizations to simplify complexity, improve control, and scale with confidence. With AI-driven automation at the core, Tipalti helps modern finance teams move faster, work smarter, and support growth at every stage.
Ready to Build a More Resilient Finance Function?
Modern finance teams outperform when they automate. Companies using advanced finance automation reduce manual effort by up to 80% and close their books 25–50% faster. Learn the strategies today’s leaders use to boost agility, accuracy, and scale.
