Three key strategies for empowering your finance team

Finance teams are often overwhelmed by manual, repetitive tasks like data entry and report generation. While essential, these activities limit finance professionals' capacity for higher-value work that drives business strategy and growth. 

Consequently, it's important that your organization helps to empower your finance team to automate routine tasks and focus on advanced analytics that is better equipped to make data-driven decisions.

In this guide, we will review three key practical strategies to help shift finance teams from reactive data processors to proactive strategic advisors:

• Automating manual, repetitive finance tasks
• Empowering teams with advanced analytics
• Aligning financial operations with broader business strategy

By providing the right tools and environment, your team can transform its function into a powerhouse of analytical insights that will steer your company toward a winning future.

1. Automate manual, repetitive finance tasks

Many finance teams spend inordinate time on manual tasks like:

• Data entry into accounting systems
• Invoice processing and approvals
• Expense reimbursement
• Monthly account reconciliations
• Report generation for regulatory filings

Automating these repetitive, low-complexity tasks delivers powerful benefits:

Increased productivity

When time spent on routine tasks is reduced through automation, your finance professionals gain the capacity to take on higher-value work that leverages their financial expertise.

Improved accuracy

Manual processes inevitably lead to errors that can impact the integrity of financial data. Automating standard procedures and calculations minimizes mistakes.

Accelerated processes

Automation speeds up finance processes and ensures timely completion, improving departmental efficiency.

Reduced risks and costs

Automating compliance processes enhances accuracy, lowers risks of penalties, and reduces associated costs.

Enhanced employee experience

By eliminating drudgery, automation enables more fulfilling work and greater job satisfaction for finance staff.

How to get started with finance process automation

While it is easy to say how automation works in theory. In practice, there are often many roadblocks before processes can effectively be automated. As such, it's important to follow a broader strategy to kick off automation projects: 

1. Identify and prioritise automation opportunities 

Catalog finance processes and prioritize those with the highest volume of repetitive tasks. Also, consider pain points faced by the team and areas of frequent errors.

2. Select suitable automation technologies

Many automated solutions exist, however, for repetitive workflows as they exist in financial ops, the following are the most likely to result in immediate productivity gains: 

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bots that emulate user actions for routine digital tasks.
• Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) uses AI to extract information from invoices and receipts.
• Purpose-built automation features in enterprise platforms like ERPs.

3. Start small, demonstrate quick wins 

As with many things, it's crucial to get started before scaling; a small project that works out successfully often motivates the workforce to include the new processes in other areas and the broader business. Hence, choose a contained process and automate end-to-end before scaling across other areas.

4. Monitor and optimise 

Once the initial project has kicked off successfully, make sure you continuously monitor for automation gaps or new opportunities. Keep on using new technologies such as process mining to identify other optimization areas as well.

Case study — how corporates automate financial processes

Many times, without practical examples, it is difficult to imagine how transformation works; here is a case study of how large corporates have effectively integrated automation into their financial operations workflows: 

‍JP Morgan uses an AI platform called COiN to automate commercial loan processing and handle millions of documents.

In 2017, the bank deployed an AI platform called COiN (Contract Intelligence) to automate the review and interpretation of commercial loan agreements and associated documents. Previously, their lawyers would have to manually review loan packages page-by-page to extract key clauses and insights — an arduous process for complex contracts. With COiN's natural language processing capabilities, this time-consuming task is now automated.

By emulating such success stories as with JP Morgan, your organization can kickstart a finance automation journey that frees up strategic bandwidth.

2. Empower teams with advanced analytics

As finance tasks get automated, data accuracy and availability will improve significantly. This opens new opportunities to apply advanced analytics and derive actionable business insights.

Your business can then move on to invest in enabling technologies and align teams to an analytics-focused mandate. Again, following the start-small-first approach until reaching the broader organization by:

Upgrading the technology stack

First in the line for modern analytics is typically moving key databases into the cloud and normalizing and adjusting the data structure. Hence: 

• Deploy cloud-based platforms for on-demand data access and scalability in computations.
• Implement BI tools with interactive data visualization capabilities like Power BI and Tableau.
• Create data pipelines and lakes to pull, process, and connect data from diverse sources.
• Ensure data quality and integrity across all your systems.

Develop analytical capabilities

Once the data is normalized and in the cloud, you can continue to: 

• Hire talent with strong data science skills and analytical mindsets.
• Train staff on techniques like statistical analysis, data modeling, forecasting, and data storytelling.
• Shift culture to evidence-based decision-making grounded in data.

Apply data analytics across finance processes

The data is now ready to be integrated into the broader decision-making process for: 

• Strategic planning (market trend analysis, forecasting, scenario modeling)
• Financial planning (driver-based forecasting, variance analysis, etc.)
• Management reporting (interactive visualization and insights for business leaders)
• Continuous monitoring (real-time dashboards across finance KPIs)

Help the broader organization leverage data

You’re now ready to position finance as the go-to analytics hub across departments like:

• Using pricing analytics to optimize offers and discounts for sales teams
• Developing HR dashboards with attrition predictions and workforce insights
• Creating manufacturing models to simulate production scenarios for operations leaders

By democratizing data analytics across business units, the finance department can drive greater organizational alignment on strategy and objectives.

3. Aligning financial operations with broader business strategy

For finance teams to drive strategy and growth within an organization, your teams must align planning cycles and key performance indicators to broader organizational goals. This strategic orientation should be reflected in the following:

Goal setting

Ensure finance team goals ladder up to business priorities and strategies. Cascade organization-level KPIs like revenue growth, market share etc. down to finance.

Decision rights

Involve finance leaders in key business decisions like new market entry, M&A deals, pricing changes, etc.

Reporting structures

Have finance team heads report directly to business unit leaders vs. sitting in corporate siloes.

Collaboration mechanisms

Facilitate frequent touchpoints between finance and functions like operations, sales, and HR to coordinate shared objectives.

Leadership commitment

Ensure executive leadership publicly communicates the strategic role of finance and participates in joint activities.

Individual development plans

Include skills like partnering, storytelling, and influencing in staff development plans to foster a business advisor mindset.

Rewards and recognition

Link finance staff bonuses and recognition explicitly to business performance indicators, underscoring strategic alignment.

Examples from strategic finance teams

Leading companies are integrating finance talent across key business functions to foster alignment and data-driven decision-making. For example, finance professionals can be assigned to collaborate with marketing, operations, and IT as embedded business partners. Rather than being siloed in a corporate reporting role, these finance specialists are situated right within business units.

They contribute financial expertise to activities like:

• Developing pricing models and ROI forecasts for new marketing campaigns
• Conducting cost-benefit analysis for proposed technology investments
• Building driver-based models to simulate production scenarios for operations

By realigning reporting structures, decision rights, KPIs, and incentives, finance can pivot from scorekeeper to strategic business partner.

Conclusion

By automating routine tasks, embracing advanced analytics, fostering continuous learning, and aligning strategically with the broader organization, you can empower your finance team to create value within your organization.

Are you ready to upscale your finance operation’s department productivity and free them from mundane tasks such as payment reconciliation? Reitere does exactly that! Book a demo today, and we’ll show you how your organization benefits and how your team can be liberated from the most mundane ops tasks.