The fall and winter months are upon us, and there is something to celebrate every day. While we want to sip on our pumpkin spice lattes and watch holiday films in a cozy, candle-lit room, some necessary Q4 operations must be handled.
Every holiday has a theme that can influence your team’s work and help you stay ahead of the curve. Learn to celebrate—and streamline—all in one read.
The Creepy, Cold Halloween Finance Back Office
They’re creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky; they’re all together draining: workflow bottlenecks. Keeping your head above water is downright soul-crushing for anyone who has worked in a back-office role without the right software.
To avoid the dark and haunted back-office monsters, we’ve composed a list of five terrifying pain points found in the finance department and how to overcome them.
The Blood-Sucking Complexities of Compliance
Collecting tax information from a vendor is laborious when done manually. Often, vendors forget to attach essential tax documents with their payment information, causing your company to track them down at the end of the year.
By implementing the right finance tech stack, you can completely automate the collection of tax forms. You can confidently scale worldwide with international tax capabilities, and your business can put the responsibility on the vendors to provide their tax forms to get paid. With the right solution, your company will be tax compliant and ready for tax season.
The Nightmares of Fraud Breaches
High-velocity companies are sending out thousands of invoices at scale. They want to ensure that their payments to their global partners are quick and accurate. But manual payments increasingly invite fraud.
42% of companies worth $1 billion to $10 billion experience fraud. 34% of businesses endure customer fraud. Companies that process payments through checks, expense reimbursements, and wire transfers are incredibly vulnerable to cybercrimes. AP fraud can occur within a business’s team members, scammers, suppliers, vendors, and elite criminals.
But with an AP and GPP solution, you’re increasing fraud control. A robust system protects your company against internal and external fraud.
Accuracy Hocus Pocus
Invoice matching, wire transfers, tigers—oh my!
The finance function is no easy beast to tame. Human error is inevitable with invoice matching, payments, writing checks and addresses, and managing expenses. When mistakes start to mount up, finance teams spend sleepless nights fixing errors to catch up on payments.
Human error and the horrors of simple, repetitive tasks can make up 84% of your finance team’s daily workload, leading to low productivity.
With automation, mundane tasks are instantly processed, and human error is eliminated. You can maximize productivity and accurately uncover financial records. Once these dreaded inconsistencies are handled, finance team members have time to collaborate across departments and make intelligent decisions for their business.
Close the Books Before Cobwebs Appear
The never-ending race to return your journal entries to zero is strenuous. Manual adjustments, transferring balances, and meeting pressured deadlines can cause severe burnout and discouragement. What should be a routine task becomes a living nightmare.
With the right solution, companies can instantly reconcile payments and close the books on time—if not earlier.
Terrifying Scenarios with Partners & Clients
The scary four bottlenecks all lead to a business’s biggest fear of all: soured relations. Building and managing strong partner relations is vital to a successful company venture.
It takes one mistake to make a partner turn away from your company. Partners expect a white-glove payment experience, with seamless processes in:
- Supplier Selection
- Supplier Onboarding
- Third-Party Risk Management & Supplier Monitoring
- Supplier Offboarding
You can’t just throw candy on a finance function and hope for sweeter results. Your finance team must utilize innovative strategies and streamline processes to eliminate workflow complexities.
Suppliers want their partners to advocate for them and expect to be paid quickly and efficiently for any project. When partner advocacy is established, they’re more likely to be long-term partners contributing to your business’s success.
Give Thanks to Your Finance Team
Thanksgiving is an opportunity to harvest good wishes from the past year and for the year to come. While this holiday is celebrated primarily in the US, the theme is infused in organizations that value positive company culture.
Showing gratitude to team members is just one of the perks. Holiday baskets, email shout-outs, extra time off, and free lunches are straightforward ways to give thanks to your employees. But good wishes go beyond materials; employees want to receive good benefits—including health, salary, and modern technology.
Manual work is discouraging for the finance team. When team members are inundated with mundane tasks, they struggle to provide valuable insights into the company’s financials. When companies implement a finance tech stack that eliminates tedious workflows, team members can focus on mission-critical tasks and reach their full potential.
Today, companies update their workflows because employees expect to complete tasks like it’s 2022—not 1922. The human impact of digital transformation empowers team members to expand their roles across departments. Modern workplace efficiencies influence employee attraction and retention.
Eight Qualities Finance Team Members Seek in their CFO
- Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Emotionally intelligent finance leaders manage their emotions in real-time. They can resist knee-jerk reactions and be proactive in the moment. Additionally, a CFO with a high EQ appreciates all their staff accomplishes, and they don’t sweat the small stuff—the exact ingredients we remember to behold during the beloved eight days of Hanukkah!
Emotionally intelligent executives have these characteristics:
- Influential
- Empathetic
- Team Focused
When CFOs prioritize these traits, they have a competitive advantage because they create long-term, sustainable methods to manage company workloads.
- Mentorship & Coaching
CFOs have experienced the leadership journey and know the hurdles greener professionals face. A CFO can mentor individuals so they can accelerate their professional development by giving them insight into goals and aspirations. Their knowledge and experience can help newer professionals navigate leadership, strategic initiatives, and governance. They can be a motivator and a sounding board to fresh finance professionals. Modern CFOs know that technology is the finance industry’s future, and they are elevating these tools to educate the next generation on how to conquer their roles. They are now giving their mentees options to reach their desired aspirations.
- Leverage Cross-Department Collaborations
Historically, CFOs and their teams have hidden behind the scenes to keep business going. Now, they are emerging as valued strategists across the organization. Modern leaders work closely with peers and unite their thinking around the role of finance. Instead of working in a siloed environment, CFOs keep the lines of communication open so the entire company can achieve invaluable success.
- Communication
CFOs are master communicators, even if most communicate via email or text. Whether they discuss initiatives through virtual video calls or in-person meetings, they effectively articulate their needs and expectations to drive success. Finance leaders state their mission clearly and concisely so their team can collaborate on company goals.
Additionally, they are good listeners. While they lead team meetings, they ensure each employee has a seat at the table and can vocalize their thoughts and aspirations.
- Make Sure the Books are Audit-Ready
The finance market requires transparency and accuracy when reporting financial journals. Regarding economic and operational results, partners in public businesses expect speed and efficiency. To close the books on time, CFOs cultivate a robust finance tech stack and talented team members to ensure accurate financial reporting.
- Checks & Balances
Business priorities include reporting, providing insights into the finance function, driving strategy, and managing day-to-day finance workflows. Failure to balance priorities causes limitations for the finance team. Without a streamlined workflow, finance teams lose the ability to impact their operations positively.
It’s critical for finance leaders to firmly grasp financial visibility and ensure their role is aligned with administrating transparency. Automation provides the necessary tools to support financial responsibilities and make informed decisions.
- Harnessing Financial Strategies
Strong financial leaders are strategic thinkers that take part in creating short-form and long-form organizational goals. These modern leaders are responsible for harnessing current strategies for business success. They’ve broadened their roles across departments to offer unique perspectives on strategies for capital allocation. They design strategies to scale international growth, manage costs and compliance, and prepare the company for public offerings.
The CFO helps drive strategies and ensure company performances are on schedule with their goals. These leaders make informed decisions with accurate data and metrics, so the company can efficiently grow and scale.
- Strong Leadership Skills
The finance team has a reputation for being soft-spoken and mild-tempered. But that doesn’t have to hinder a CFOs leadership. Armed with strong financial skills, they come to the executive roundtable with assertive operational strategies and influential leadership initiatives. They have data-backed ideas and successfully navigate their team to short-term and long-term accomplishments.
Automation: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
If you have ever worked in a finance department with obsolete workflows, you know how agonizing manual tasks can be. Manual workflow processes open up opportunities for tax fraud, cybersecurity risks, human error, late payments, late payment penalties, the inability to make payments with multiple currencies, soured relations with suppliers, and much more. These pain points set the business back in operations and leave a bleak mark on how employees and suppliers view the organization.
Additionally, the pandemic has caused many companies to work virtually, amplifying the need to streamline workflows. Without the right solution in place, employee stress increases significantly. They can’t hit deadlines on time, and poor project management discourages their self-confidence to perform their job roles.
Strenuous workflows create a harsh environment. By not having a modernized workflow, employees are turned off by archaic practices and won’t hesitate to change jobs—perhaps with a competitor—that upholds more modern values and practices.
Companies can reach long-term success by addressing these pain points and workflow bottlenecks with a robust tech stack.
The solution? Automation—the ultimate Christmas gift!
Businesses should use solutions and tools to automate finance processes. By automating finance workflows, the finance team reduces errors, completes tasks quickly and efficiently, and eliminates manual, mundane tasks.
Innovative solutions boost productivity by increasing visibility, giving finance executives and their teams a complete view of how operations are achieved. Automation eliminates human error, gives suppliers a white glove experience by offering accessible onboarding features, and takes the weight off your employees’ stressed shoulders.
With the right automatic technology, your company can reduce intense manual work and encourage team members to take charge of their roles.
Ring in the New Year with an End-to-End Payables Solution
Q1 is an excellent time for companies to start with a fresh slate. While making resolutions for the business is a great start, finance leaders should get the wheels turning by proactively implementing a robust financial solution.
Tipalti has the answers. The automated finance technology handles accounts payable and mass payments workflow. From instant reconciliation, PO matching, and multi-FX options, Tipalti takes the stress out of the finance team’s hands so they can focus on more empowering projects. The automatic solution reduces hiring additional headcount and up to 80% of the team’s workload.
The solution gives users a white-glove experience with its accessible implementation features and ability to integrate with other solutions, such as ERPs Intacct, NetSuite, Sage, and more.
Tipalti is not a chore; it is an innovative solution to help you start your 2023 off right.
