Why it’s time for your organisation to make modern accounting work

Are artificial intelligence and automation high on the executive agenda in your organisation this year? If the answer is yes, join the club.

Around Australia, enterprises of all stripes and sizes are pondering how best to harness the power of these transformative technologies – and how quickly they should be doing so.

Two in five local businesses are adapting their business models in response to rising costs, inflation and the country’s low unemployment rate – the last making it challenging for organisations to reliably attract the talent they need – according to 2023 research.

They’re bringing automation into the mix to reduce repetitive work and free up their teams to focus on higher value activities.

Those that aren’t doing so should be, given the extraordinary productivity and efficiency gains the judicious deployment of automation can deliver – and the competitive disadvantage that will inevitably result from persisting with the manual programs, processes and platforms of yesteryear.

Although it may not be an imagination capturing exercise, the finance and accounting function can be an excellent place to begin your AI and automation journey.

Why automated accounting makes sense

There are a number of reasons why this is so, at least for organisations that hope to see a compelling return on their automation investment in a short space of time.

Far from being an experimental use case, the rationale for automating the accounting process has long been made out.

Cloud-based automated accounting technology eliminates many of the repetitive, manual elements that were integral to the accounting function historically.

Software powered by AI and machine learning can process transactions continually throughout the accounting period, thereby doing away with end-of-period bottlenecks and the hours of overtime needed to clear them.

Automated accounting results are accurate as well as fast – considerably more so than data that’s been touched by the human hand of your finance team, however capable and highly trained they may be.

Enterprises that make the switch can expect to reduce their manual processing time by 85 per cent and their average error rate to virtually nil.

And because it’s hosted in the cloud, automated accounting technology enables unprecedented flexibility; making it possible for your formerly-office-tied finance team to work from anywhere that has an internet connection.

Finally, having access to a single source of truth about the company’s financial status that’s up-to-the-minute accurate – not a reflection of the status quo months earlier, last the books were balanced – enables leaders to make more informed decisions.

Overcoming the obstacles to an optimum outcome

But compelling though the benefits undoubtedly are, not all finance automation projects are unqualified successes.

In common with other ICT initiatives, they can flounder and badly too: the overall failure rate for digital transformation projects is currently running at a sobering 70 per cent.

While every project is different, organisations that don’t achieve optimum outcomes when automating their finance functions typically have a number of things in common.

Very often their projects have a limited purpose, courtesy of the fact that the organisations in question have failed to find and articulate a compelling ‘why’ – an inarguable financial and organisational imperative for the significant investment they’re making.

Projects leaders and their teams invariably work better when they’re given a clearly defined purpose and achievable goals. Failure to establish them at the outset tends to lead to lacklustre outcomes.

So does poor execution. Without the right combination of technical ability, industry knowledge and in-depth understanding of the enterprise, teams may struggle to make steady progress and hit their project goals.

Setting your finance transformation program up for success

The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. Aligning transformation aspirations with organisational goals, obtaining executive level buy-in, and enlisting the assistance of well credentialled partners with a strong track record for delivering comparable projects on time and on budget will up the odds of achieving genuine benefits from your investment in finance automation.

Moreover, the lessons learnt can be applied to future automation initiatives elsewhere in the enterprise.

If productivity and profitability are your priorities this year, it’s past time to get started.

By Rosie Cairnes, Regional Vice President, BlackLine.