See firsthand how Reiterate can transform your payment operations management.
Fill the form below and our team will be touch with you shortly.
Finance teams are often bogged down by manual tasks like data entry and report generation, which limits their ability to focus on strategic work. Automation enables your teams to focus on higher-value work and make better data-driven decisions.
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:
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.
Many finance teams spend inordinate time on manual tasks like:
Automating these repetitive, low-complexity tasks delivers powerful benefits:
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.
Manual processes inevitably lead to errors that can impact the integrity of financial data. Automating standard procedures and calculations minimizes mistakes.
Automation speeds up finance processes and ensures timely completion, improving departmental efficiency.
Automating compliance processes enhances accuracy, lowers risks of penalties, and reduces associated costs.
By eliminating drudgery, automation enables more fulfilling work and greater job satisfaction for finance staff.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Discover how Reiterate can streamline and automate your financial operations, freeing up your team for strategic growth initiatives.
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:
First in the line for modern analytics is typically moving key databases into the cloud and normalizing and adjusting the data structure. Hence:
Once the data is normalized and in the cloud, you can continue to:
The data is now ready to be integrated into the broader decision-making process for:
You’re now ready to position finance as the go-to analytics hub across departments like:
By democratizing data analytics across business units, the finance department can drive greater organizational alignment on strategy and objectives.
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:
Ensure finance team goals ladder up to business priorities and strategies. Cascade organization-level KPIs like revenue growth, market share etc. down to finance.
Involve finance leaders in key business decisions like new market entry, M&A deals, pricing changes, etc.
Have finance team heads report directly to business unit leaders vs. sitting in corporate siloes.
Facilitate frequent touchpoints between finance and functions like operations, sales, and HR to coordinate shared objectives.
Ensure executive leadership publicly communicates the strategic role of finance and participates in joint activities.
Include skills like partnering, storytelling, and influencing in staff development plans to foster a business advisor mindset.
Link finance staff bonuses and recognition explicitly to business performance indicators, underscoring strategic alignment.
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:
By realigning reporting structures, decision rights, KPIs, and incentives, finance can pivot from scorekeeper to strategic business partner.
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.