Why your finance department needs to embrace technology transformation in FY2024
As businesses brace for ongoing disruption, finance leaders need to innovate and automate if they’re to meet the demands being placed on them.
All signs suggest we’re in for some tough times over the next 12 months. Rising costs are making it harder for businesses to maintain their margins. Finding and keeping trained staff is difficult, courtesy of the country’s ongoing skills shortages. And shoring up demand is likely to get trickier in FY2024, as consumers and businesses alike look to contain their costs by reining in non-essential spending.
Against that backdrop, business leaders will be looking to their finance teams, for information and responsive, expert support on a myriad of critical commercial issues.
In the past, the primary purpose of the finance department was to keep the books and close the accounts. While this backroom work was vital to ongoing operation, there was little expectation finance personnel would play the sort of strategic business advisory role they’re now being asked to assume, in a growing number of organisations.
Exploring the automation advantage
If yours is one of them, you may be grappling with the question of how you’ll deliver the goods and continue to perform the bread and butter accounting tasks which historically took up the bulk of your team’s time, unless you hire a host of extra employees to help with the workload.
Financial automation is the short answer. The term refers to the implementation of software that automates many of the repetitive tasks associated with the finance function – accounts reconciliation, the production of end of month statements and reports, and the like.
Rather than relying on spreadsheets and paper-based processes, a rules engine can be used to automate data-heavy activities, such as inter-company reconciliations, and credit card and invoice to purchase order matching.
As well as reducing the number of hours required to complete these tasks, month in, month out, automation reduces the error rate, down to virtually zero. That means you’ll score a further saving in human hours as a result because your team members won’t need to waste valuable time finding and fixing errors.
Becoming a better business partner
Instead, they’ll be able to devote substantially more time to value adding activities, such as ensuring business leaders have accurate, up-to-the-minute business intelligence at their fingertips.
Your organisation’s financial data represents a deep well of insights, ready to be extracted, interpreted and used to make data driven decisions that drive growth and profitability.
Who better than finance professionals to perform that task, in partnership with the leadership team, given the former’s fulsome understanding of the source material?
Retaining top talent
It’s interesting, challenging work; worlds apart from the repetitive, transactional tasks which were once the accountant’s accepted lot. Giving your team members the opportunity to do more of it may help you overcome another of the issues plaguing organisations up and down the country: employee retention.
Demand for finance personnel continues to outstrip supply and that means younger accountants, in particular, can afford to be choosy when it comes to where and how they’ll work.
Having spent four years at university earning a qualification, most are, not surprisingly, unenamoured with the thought of devoting their early career years to writing journal entries and stuffing folders with spreadsheets.
Given the choice, they’ll join, and stick with, an organisation that offers them the chance to do genuinely value adding work, to learn and to grow, professionally and personally.
Preparing for a stronger tomorrow
In today’s digital world, commercial advantage hinges on the ability to make faster, better decisions. Organisations which don’t evolve their operations to reflect this new reality are liable to be left behind. It’s time for finance to take the lead; doing things smarter, faster and better, and stepping up to help their counterparts across the enterprise do likewise. If harnessing the power of automation to transform your finance function isn’t a priority in FY2024, you’re handing a powerful advantage to farsighted competitors who’ve already embarked on the journey.
Lee Thompson, senior vice president, Asia Pacific and Japan, BlackLine
