See how forward-thinking finance teams are future-proofing their organizations through AP automation.
Reliable analytics are an invaluable resource for businesses, particularly during times of economic uncertainty. Furthermore, digital transformation as a whole is becoming not only an advantage to various businesses, but a virtual necessity — especially when considering specific tools like artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence and automation are particularly sophisticated tools that can streamline digitized processes and produce highly complex and reliable analytics.
These tools are a key resource for innovative businesses searching for ways to improve and rethink financial visibility within their organizations.
Financial Visibility Is Essential for Business Performance and Growth
Visibility allows organizations to make more accurate financial projections and for all key stakeholders to be highly aware of important financial circumstances and decisions. If a company is scaling up, visibility can help ensure it complies with all standards and regulations, and documentation of all financial processes helps finance departments scale with efficiency, minimizing or even eliminating errors.
Visibility is vital for any organization at any time, but it is particularly important during times of economic uncertainty, significant organizational shifts, and re-scaling of efforts and production. Employees and business stakeholders may be worried about how the company is reacting to a downturn in the economy, after all.
In particular, all key stakeholders must be well-informed of financial patterns and projections during any proper analysis of business performance and strategy development. Thankfully, artificial intelligence can facilitate the creation of effective projections, while automation can simplify the mining and compilation of relevant data to streamline this visibility.
Enhancing Visibility with Finance Automation
In particular, finance automation is a tool that many businesses should consider when streamlining visibility. Finance automation technology can automate a wide variety of tasks related to finances, such as invoice creation, expense management, and data analysis. In many cases, artificial intelligence may be utilized as a part of this automation process.
Centralize and Scale With Cloud-Based Data
Cloud computing is an effective way to store and process your data using third-party resources. This offers many advantages, such as data encryption, outsourcing IT processes, and more efficient scalability. Integrating data with a cloud storage and analytics platform can ease the data management burdens of an organization. Many such platforms feature a variety of automated processes related to the organization and analysis of data.
With cloud-based data on hand, you won’t have to worry about collecting data “by hand” and you can report your company’s earnings for your stakeholders to look at more readily.
Level Up Analytics and Reporting
Automated processes can streamline the analysis of data sets, an invaluable tool for large or growing organizations. They can also facilitate the compilation and distribution of reports related to data analysis.
For example, such automated tools can sort and extract relevant data, comb said data for important patterns, and then develop and send a detailed report to relevant management and stakeholders. This can keep all involved apprised of factors such as spending and consumer behaviors.
Streamline Accounts Payable
Accounts payable are debts out by an organization to entities such as suppliers and creditors. These debts can be difficult to keep track of, particularly in the case of a large business that works with a large variety of other organizations.
By automating accounts payable management processes, an organization can more easily keep a catalog of its debts and which of those debts have been paid. It can also not only reduce human error related to bookkeeping but also simplify accountability for any mistakes made in the cataloging or payment process.
Eliminate Barriers to Scalability
Changes in the size or output of a business are typically significant obstacles for a business to manage and overcome. By implementing flexibility in processes early, organizations can minimize the hassle when such changes occur.
Automation is one way to increase flexibility, as automated processes can more easily expand or dial back than those that have to be attended to by a human employee. For example, finance automation can ease the growing pains of a company now dealing with a large increase in payments on a global scale.
Enhanced Security and Issue Avoidance
Some companies worry that with more visibility and use of automation, they’ll be more susceptible to security breaches, especially if this data focuses on their finances. This is where cybersecurity comes in with the help of AI.
Much of the cybersecurity process involves the identification of known threats and vulnerabilities, as well as the implementation of standard protocols to address these threats and vulnerabilities. It also often involves the installation of relevant updates.
All of these processes can often be automated with relative ease. Meanwhile, more complex threat detection and response procedures can sometimes be addressed by software utilizing artificial intelligence.
Automate Common Workflows
Many work processes are relatively simple and highly repetitive, and these are often easy to automate. Most notably, you may consider bookkeeping as one of these processes that are relatively easy to automate within a finance department.
Automation of these tasks can not only free up the time of employees, but may also improve the consistency of financial processes and reporting. This consistency can improve the legibility of information and minimize guesswork as it pertains to payments and finance management.
Strengthen Compliance and Financial Reporting
There are many laws regulating financial processes within organizations, overseen by government bodies such as the IRS. Businesses must follow these laws to the letter to avoid any legal repercussions. Because accounting automation promotes consistency of outcomes, it can prevent human error that causes legal disasters with the IRS.
Furthermore, finance automation can reduce the chance of intentional intervention from bad actors. Automation can similarly optimize financial reporting requirements that may need to be distributed to investors and shareholders, or even to take an organization public in some cases.
Drive Behavior Transformation
All of the above methods and applications can provide new and improved insights to management and stakeholders, and may even be able to drive behavior changes and cost transformation within an organization. In short, by clearly demonstrating financial goals and processes, a company can more effectively optimize the behavior of human variables as well — driving comprehensive, long-term growth.
