When we were all sent home in the March of 2020 to work virtually, most of us had never had to rely on some of the digital ways of life that we now use every day. Zoom, Cisco WebEx, and Microsoft Teams meetings changed the way that we interact with each other.
Meetings were extremely awkward at first: cameras on or off, relying on your poor at-home Wifi, or trying to keep your children at bay while you were presenting. Now that it’s time to head back to the office, some of those problems go away while new ones arise. How can we focus on the positives that have come out of this unique situation? While most of us were complaining about staying inside, others were changing the way we leverage financial technology.
As I said, some of us struggled to adjust socially, but how about how we operated as businesses? Suddenly the need to understand and utilize technology became increasingly important, especially in a back-office role. If your company still ran on paper copies of purchase orders and invoices, your job suddenly became much more complex.
You had to learn a new way to organize and efficiently manage the way you did work in an entirely new way. Now that it has been over a year of staying at home, you are adjusted to the way you handle work in a virtual environment and are struggling to cope with the realities of coming back to the office. Will you go back to the way things were? Struggling to sort paper copies and following endless paper trails for days at a time? Or will you use your experience in a virtual environment to continue to innovate?
While you may have been honing your skills at manually reconciling purchase orders and invoices, there is a better way to operate in a virtual way. You may have enjoyed your time doing things virtually, it may have even cut down on costs of your business and opened up free time to explore other opportunities as a business professional, but there are still ways to improve.
Many businesses and companies have found that utilizing financial technology in their AP/AR offices completely changed the way their back-office operates. You are able to instantly reconcile data and eliminate the need for chasing paper trails. Think about how long it takes you to manually find a missing purchase order or invoice and think about doing that in a fraction of the time.
Not only are you saving time in your role, but you can also now leverage that time and energy elsewhere. You no longer have to be a paper pusher in the back office, you can use your financial acumen to transform yourself into a business leader. You may have found that switching your business from a paper-heavy setting to a business that runs on spreadsheets is fast, but the next step to innovating your business is utilizing financial technology.
The use of this financial technology will not only help you as you perform your daily actions, but you will also be able to put your business to the next level. The percentage of businesses using financial technology is still low, but growing rapidly. Traditionally, only huge companies and corporations were able to afford this type of advancement in their technology, but now you can use these systems on a smaller scale.
Do not be afraid to push your business to the next level and move past your competition. The time to switch is now while we are moving back into a more in-person setting. Use financial technology to your benefit and show your executive leadership that there are more improvements to be made in your business.
Our world is constantly changing and technology has been at the forefront of those changes. They also are showing no signs of slowing down. We tend to overlook the signs of technological changes in our lives. For example, we have Amazon Alexa’s in our homes to assist us with playing music, finding recipes, or even ordering food. Other changes tend to be more extreme or seem straight out of a science fiction movie. Have you seen Tesla’s plans to release a life-like robot? Times seem to be crazy now, but we all make investments into technology and automation without even thinking about it most of the time. Why do we make these investments into our daily at-home lives but not in the workplace? That is about to change.
Large firms are making heavy investments into their research and development teams for automation, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. These three fields are leading the way for large and small companies all around the world. Not only will these fields change the way our companies are run, but they will also affect our companies’ cultures as well. The ways we conduct business has been changed drastically since the pandemic struct. This gave companies a large shock and a chance to take a step back and say, “Why are we doing things this way?”
Artificial intelligence in Accounting
Remember those human errors we mentioned before? How often does it happen to an experienced worker? Maybe a few times a year? What if someone made a mistake once and then never again. This is what we get when we combine artificial intelligence into the workplace. A mechanical brain that is the center of perfection. You will never have to be plagued with the inconsistencies of human error and you can live in harmony with your operating systems.
Data analytics in Accounting or KPI´s
This field is one of the fastest-growing fields in business. Companies are constantly trying to reassess their positions in the market and data analytics help them do so. Leveraging data analysis from a specific software puts you at the forefront of business optimization. Never question where you stand again, where you currently are, and where you have stood in the past with powerful analytics technology.
Automation in Accounting
Automation changes the way we think about doing business. In our accounting positions, how often are we plagued with repetitive tasks that take forever and seem elementary? For an experienced employee in an accounting or back-office role, they can do this task easily and usually with very little human error. But this takes years of experience, training, and certification. What if instead of taking the time for someone to learn these skills for them to be eventually trained and pass down this field of knowledge, we purchase a system that already knows how to do these tasks and does it instantly. That’s the power of automation.
Reach out to a representative to find out more about automation.
Let’s start by fast-forwarding to January 2022 (hard to believe it’s already just 4 months away, right?). You’re at a gathering, hopefully with lots of people that don’t have COVID. Midnight hits, the champagne flows, and the alcohol-fueled resolutions start coming hard and fast. In spite of being tipsy, more than a few people every year seem to remember how much they want to get in shape. So they plunk down the payments for a gym, they go for a week, and then they never go back.
During that week of extreme productivity, you’re pretty likely to hear from at least one person on how sore they were just from doing simple exercises like running or jogging. That’s sort of the point of today’s post. Even when you have a relatively simple task in front of you, it’s still going to take some significant adjustment if you haven’t done it in a really long time. For example, during the pandemic, many of us got used to working at home and slower speeds of business. Those of you who run your own business probably got used to slower productivity, too.
Now that business and consumer demand have picked up considerably since then, we’re all seeing just how much adjusting people need to do as they go back to the workplace or figure out a new balance between home and work. This time right now is the perfect opportunity for you to get ahead of your competition via automation because your technology doesn’t need to make time-consuming social adjustments. From a business perspective, this pandemic has shown us why automation really does keep things “business as usual” when the rest of the world is recovering.
Let’s look at each of those and think about how to use this information to your advantage:
Complacency and resistance are stopping AP automation
Digital payments are up, but full automation is not
Business-to-consumer processes are more automated now, but business-to-business processes are not
Most businesses want to automate right now but are struggling to gain momentum
Suppliers are having a huge impact on showing why AP automation is critical
Don’t Get Comfortable
The old cliche goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That’s good advice to follow in most cases. However, in the business world, there’s always a premium placed on innovation. Businesses that can innovate stay open for a long time. Businesses that don’t innovate may have short-term success but little to say for extended growth. Don’t be afraid to spend money now to save lots more later on.
A Good Start On Payments
If you’re already digitizing payments or have begun that process, you’re ahead of many companies at the moment. If you want to get further ahead, though, automate the entire AP process. That includes the steps of invoice capture, payment, and searching for inefficiencies in your processes.
Think About Fellow Businesses, Too
Automating the process when dealing with customers is an excellent start. If you want to be a long-term player, automate those same processes when you have business-to-business transactions, too. That’s probably one of the best ways to maintain your status as an innovator.
Identify The Obstacles
Sometimes, obstacles are internal. You could have reluctant employees or perhaps even your own apprehension. Those issues are easier to address because you can control how much information you obtain on something new, like automation. The external obstacles are the hard ones, though. Sometimes, suppliers and vendors just don’t accept digital payments right now. If you have good relationships with them, a simple nudge might be all it takes. If those suppliers and vendors have no interest in going digital, they’ll have questions to answer if you end up going in a different direction with other suppliers and vendors that are more up-to-date.
Suppliers Are Showing The Way
Payments to suppliers are up because consumer demand is up. In many cases, the influx of orders is way beyond the stress capacity of your AP employees even prior to the pandemic. All of these extra interactions with suppliers are showing why automation is the best way to keep up with the world right now.
Reach out to us and let us conduct an AP health check to give you the most specific spots that need your attention. Keep us updated on your progress on our social media pages, and keep checking our blog for more info.
We get it. Change can generate caution. Sometimes big change even results in fear. No one wants that, especially when you’re trying to manage lots of different employees with different styles who bring different benefits to your business.
Time is a limited quantity, though. When we bring in change, we know that it really matters how we deliver the message to those looking for strong leadership. Even if you have a company full of eager employees that are all-in on automation, you still need to make sure that you set them up for success. Positive attitudes only go so far. Execution matters.
That’s where we come in. We want to make sure you deliver the type of training that can get your employees off and running in the most efficient way right from the start. To do that, we have our specialized AP Automation Health Check.
Our health check is usually a 3-day process designed to give you a comprehensive report that can help maximize your potential return on investment into AP automation software.
Day 1 We start out by gaining a deeper understanding of your company, including your AP invoice types and process flows. We need this information because it helps us show you how specific features of AP automation software yields immediate benefits. Think of this day as a focus on the big picture. When you develop a plan, you need to know the end goal first. You can’t budget time and resources appropriately when you don’t know what it all leads to. Day 1 is where we start big and then figure out what the dream looks like.
Day 2 On this day, it’s critical for us to meet with your team and determine how their talents can be maximized via automation. We consider all of the stages of the payment process, which means we meet with just about any stakeholder who’s involved at any stage of payment. While we may identify inefficiencies throughout this health check, we’re doing so with the intent of using software to fix them.
Day 3 As we wrap up the health check, we use the final day to focus on cross-functional team discussions. This stage gives us the chance to see how payment processes look within your business as a whole. It’s usually the last piece of information we need to offer you a set of observations and recommendations on how to start your automation transition. Overall, we want to give you a comprehensive strategy with short fixes, minor projects, and major undertakings that will result in lots of long-term success due to automation.
In addition, we also have an extensive set of tools to help you assess your obstacles and give you the best information on how to do an efficient transition to a fully automated AP experience. Reach out to us and let us conduct an AP health check to give you the most specific spots that need your attention. Keep us updated on your progress on our social media pages, and keep checking our blog for more info.
Welcome to the club! We knew you’d come around to automation at some point.
There’s just no reason not to with the current state of how businesses operate in today’s world.
Make no mistake about it, this decision is huge. And we want to make sure we point you in the right direction the rest of the way because the big decision you just made opens you up to lots of other decisions in the short term.
It’s one of the side effects of growth, right? As your business becomes more successful, it takes on more demands. More demands mean you can’t always operate the same way you used to because the old model isn’t sustainable.
If you go back to our MLB trading deadline metaphor in the previous post, it still applies here. Teams who make those deals to acquire big-name talent for a World Series run now have new demands resulting from new needs. With the talent portion taken care of, the new needs include things like setting up a pitching rotation for the postseason and determining whose contract to extend after the season’s over. In other words, the things most teams aren’t thinking about when the season begins in March (unless you’re the Diamondbacks or Orioles, in which case the season ended in February).
So with that said, today’s post is about preparing you to think about the next set of decisions you’re going to have to make on this road to automation.
Here are the key questions to consider:
What’s the right software for the company?
How quickly can we make payments?
How efficiently can we scan documents and save them?
How much time can we save in transferring info from invoices and receipts to ledgers?
What’s The Best Program?
Spend some time with this one because there are LOTS of choices out there, each with plenty of features that fit some businesses better than others. You can make this decision a little bit easier upfront if you do some organization to your accounting ahead of time. Group your accounts into easily understandable labels. Make sure there’s no confusion about where the money’s coming from and where the money’s going. Then, start looking at software. Take a look at how the programs organize accounts. Find the model that makes the most sense to your AP/AR teams and you. If you find that truly compatible fit, you’ll be able to get constant reminders about which vendors you owe money to and which vendors still need to pay you. You’ll also be able to pull up receipts and invoices at a moment’s notice.
When Can We Pay?
Most software out there has a feature that automates online payment. You’ll often set up the software on your computers and then create accounts in an online portal where the payments actually occur. What makes this feature even niftier is that the online portal and your software can sync up instantly. When you make a payment, the online portal tells the software to deduct from the ledger. Just like that, you saved an employee some very tedious manual work.
Are E-Docs Easier?
When purchasing automation software, it’s worth your while to invest in a good scanner as well. Any invoice, receipt, or another piece of paper from a transaction can be scanned and immediately sent to the program for cataloging. As stated earlier, these programs can be a godsend for organizations. This includes documents you feed to the software, not just the ones you create within the software itself.
Does Info Travel Faster?
Arguably the best benefit of any program is the elimination of manual data entry. But you already knew that because you’ve already made the choice to automate.) Examine this feature carefully when making your decision on software. Depending on how secure you want to be, you can also sync your selection with a cloud-based account to store data online. Doing so prevents much of the duplication that causes headaches under a manual system. Here’s the thing, though: All of this security and ease doesn’t mean anything if you can’t use the software in the way that it’s intended. Study up on ease of use and then think about what it will take to train your departments. A program with lots of bells and whistles but a more difficult interface may not be the best choice. Think about who you are, who your employees are, and what your business wants to be.
So there you have it–your next set of big decisions. These are good decisions to make, though. It’s an exciting time, so embrace it. You’ve just made a decision that’s going to take your business to levels never realized before. Keep us updated on your progress on our social media pages, and keep checking our blog for more info.
During that week of extreme productivity, you’re pretty likely to hear from at least one person on how sore they were just from doing simple exercises like running or jogging. That’s sort of the point of today’s post. Even when you have a relatively simple task in front of you, it’s still going to take some significant adjustment if you haven’t done it in a really long time. For example, during the pandemic, many of us got used to working at home and slower speeds of business. Those of you who run your own business probably got used to slower productivity, too.
