In recent years, process automation,” has become one of the most exciting prospects in the finance industry. In 2019, the market was already valued at $1.4 billion. By 2027, it’s expected to reach $11 billion.
How can Process Automation be used in the accounting industry?
Process Automation has huge potential to transform the finance and accounting industries. In fact, for many companies, it already has. Here are a few of the functionalities of Process Automation accounting.
Invoice automation
Processing invoices can be a time-consuming, painstaking process. Typically, upon receiving an invoice, the accounting department needs to cross-check the items on the invoice with the services received. This may involve sending the invoices to various other members of staff or examining a series of spreadsheets.
Invoices can be cross-checked, sent to the relevant members of staff, and even paid by a software bot.
Client onboarding
When performed manually, client onboarding can take hours. To abide by compliance regulations, your company may need to examine countless documents to verify the client’s identity, complete background checks, and develop an understanding of the client’s history.
With a finance bot, this process can be performed automatically. A bot will crawl through all relevant documents in a matter of seconds to create an automatic report for your compliance manager.
Tax reporting
Compiling the necessary documents and figures to calculate your business’s taxes payable is another lengthy process that can easily result in errors and mistakes.
It has the power to gather your tax data and prepare a tax report that’s 100% accurate based on your documentation.
Preparation of financial statements
Most companies aim to track their finances on a regular basis to monitor their profits and losses and make adjustments accordingly.
With a finance bot, this process can be done at the click of a button, which is especially useful for companies that like to check their performance in real time.
Expense processing
Your company’s expenses can include everything from client lunches to business trips. When an employee files an expense, processing can involve cross-checking the figures, times, and dates to ensure accuracy before filming the information into your system.
With this process solution, a bot can pull the information from each expense form to ensure its accuracy and even test it against your company’s unique expense policies.
Financial planning
Forecasting for the next financial quarter or year can be a painstaking process involving analyzing the previous year’s data across all departments and coming up with reasonable goals based on these metrics.
A Finance bot can take the admin work out of planning by compiling the necessary data and generating a plan based on variables and algorithms set by your company.
The benefits of employing Process Automation in your business
Automating your accounting processes such as those we listed above can quickly save you both time and money. According to Gartner, Process Automation can save teams up to 25,000 hours of work every year. But it can also come with other benefits:
- A bot always eliminates the human error factor.
- It will increase the efficiency of your employees, giving them precious time to focus on high-value tasks.
- Employee satisfaction – associates who focus on value-add activity are happier than those who copy and paste for a living.
- Cost avoidance – save thousands as you scale your accounting department by growing your digital workforce as opposed to human capital.
- An automatic process gives you total visibility and traceability for audit purposes.
- You will improve your customer service by speeding up wait times and providing process visibility.
How Bunch Digital can transform your accounting department
Bunch Digital is dedicated to providing Intelligent Automation Solutions designed for your workforce’s needs. With regular bots, payback on your investment can take up to five years. With Bunch Digital, you’ll begin to see payback within six months—at a lower cost.