Are you racing against the clock to get your work done each day? We recently hosted an accounting webinar where we took a look at some technologies that can make your work life easier. If you’re not automating these 5 accounting tasks, you’re missing out on some serious time and money savings.
5 Things to Automate in Accounting
We’re not talking about replacing your current team. We’re talking about increasing the productivity of your current team by cutting out the repetitive busywork that bogs them down day after day. These are 5 key areas where you can use accounting automation to augment your existing talent:
Reminders & Alerts
How much time does your team spend reminding people outside of your department, over and over, to do their jobs? It can make you feel like you’re nagging, and relationships can become strained. Automated reminders take the nagging away, and help build relationships within the organization.
How frequently do you send emails with a string of people on the TO line or CC line? It’s easy to leave someone out, and then that person ends up out of the loop. With automated alerts, this is a thing of the past. No more leaving people out when alerts are sent out. Alerts can be automatically sent to everyone that needs them.
Data Entry & Sync
Is there a person who is literally sitting in your office all day entering data from physical or electronic documents? Or maybe even more than one person! Consider how much time your team is spending manually entering data. It’s a low-value use of your great employees, and it’s unnecessary.
Introducing… advanced capture technology!
Data entry can be easily automated through the use of an OCR system. Once entered, data can also be synced seamlessly across multiple systems.
Approval & Task Routing
Are you constantly being asked to do more with less, year after year, even though your team’s headcount isn’t growing? You’re not alone! As your company’s revenue grows, the same team is expected to manage the growing workload.
Consider how much these automation tools would help you keep up with the growing workload:
When your accounting processes are automated, the tasks involved in each process are automatically forwarded to the proper person, in additional to all the supporting information needed to make a decision.
Additionally, based on your company’s approval thresholds, the system is automatically set up to send each approval to the appropriate person.
All of this eliminates small, repetitive steps within the process, freeing your team to get more done, in a less stressful atmosphere.
Invoice Filing
Your invoice filing needs can be broken down into 2 parts: the capture of the documents and retrieving them later.
First, let’s talk about capture. Are you receiving your invoices on paper or electronically? Either way, they’ve got to be organized and stored for later retrieval. Whether your invoices are coming in through the physical mail, email, or elsewhere, the unstructured data you’re receiving can be automatically translated into structured data within your document repository.
With automated invoice capture, all data and documents are handled the same, consolidating the information in a usable format that is easy to search and access when you need it.
Stop shoving paper into filing cabinets! Automated invoice filing means your documents and data are more organized, and easier to retrieve when you need them later. Just one quick search, and that invoice is right at your fingertips.
3-Way Match
This is one of the best controls within accounting, but it’s illogical how much work is put into this very logical control structure. You end up tripling the amount of data you’re looking through. How can this work be reduced, while still maintaining the accuracy and control of your data?
When you integrate the data from your incoming invoices, you can validate them with the data in your major line-of-business systems, but not manually – automatically, through accounting automation tools.
Imagine how your workday would change if you could automate these 5 accounting tasks? Your desk would transform. You’d print (and waste) less paper. No more bumping into filing cabinets everywhere you turn. No more watching your inbox pile up and wondering when in the world you’ll get to all of those tasks.
Instead, picture serenity, organization, regaining control. That’s what accounting automation can do for you.
Want to know more about how these 5 automation tools work? Check out the webinar recording for more details.
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