Don’t let repetitive, time-consuming financial processes slow your company down
Key takeaways:
- Finance and accounting professionals play a crucial role in driving business growth but a lot of companies underuse these resources because they’re bogged down in inefficient financial processes.
- Financial processes like invoicing, billing, and reporting can weigh down a business due to their time and resource-consuming nature.
- You can leverage software and outsourcing solutions to improve financial workflows and make your teams more productive.
- Streamlining and optimizing financial workflows is extremely important to ensuring long-term sustainability.
Every business needs finance and accounting professionals (whether people or software or both) because they play a crucial role in driving both business growth and strategy. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t use these important resources because their finance teams are bogged down with ineffective finance processes.
Essential financial processes such as reporting, billing, accounts receivable and payable, and invoicing can take up a lot of time due to their resource-consuming nature. To thrive in today’s competitive market, businesses need to use their resources and time as efficiently as possible. Fortunately, you can streamline and enhance your financial tasks in various ways.
One way to make your processes more efficient is by leveraging technology like accounting automation software. Automating tasks can cut down on time waste and improve processes.
Hiring a reputable Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm for financial processes is another fantastic way to speed up and improve your workflows. A BPO firm can help scale and grow your business cost-effectively by providing you with highly-skilled labor.
Investing in ways to streamline and optimize your company’s financial processes plays a critical role in ensuring greater growth, success, and long-term sustainability. We’ll list the common financial processes for businesses that require improvement and offer effective “hacks” to improve them for increased efficiency and profitability.
Common financial processes that need improvement
Many companies struggle with efficiently completing financial tasks that can be time and resource-consuming. Most finance departments have several recurring processes and complete repetitive activities. Some of the tasks that commonly need improvement include:
- Accounts payable and receivable – Covers activities like invoicing, payment processing, and billing.
- Expense management – Includes areas such as employee expense reimbursement, cost allocations, and reporting.
- Budgeting and forecasting – Includes financial planning and profit and loss (P&L) activities.
- Auditing and cash flow – Covers processes like regulatory reporting, policy compliance, and cash flow management.
- Payroll processes – Includes activities such as salary payments, compensation and benefits administration, and income tax distribution.
Financial processes like these often take longer than they should and drain time and resources from a department. Here are eight hacks to improve them:
1. Audit your current inefficient processes
Your improvement journey should start by assessing how you handle your financial processes to understand current efficiency levels. Otherwise, you will have difficulties improving processes you can’t accurately define. Evaluate each financial process from start to end to arrive at an accurate conclusion. This evaluation enables you to detect how much time you’re actually using on these processes, missteps, and what is slowing down the processes. You will be better positioned to improve workflows once you know what’s going on.
2. Look for ways to improve the speed
You can improve your financial workflows by boosting processing speed. You can identify and eliminate unnecessary or duplicate tasks, automate repetitive tasks, and evaluate others simultaneously.
3. Reduce your operating costs
Additional workflows necessitate control implementation, costing your business more money because they might be difficult to manage and execute in emails and spreadsheets. Such insecure manual processes can hinder your company’s growth.
Therefore, consider automating workflows that are easy to monitor and standardize continuously. This cost-saving implementation could enable your business to scale up for easier.
4. Involve your team
A finance department usually has more than one team member. . Therefore, implementing steps to streamline and boost financial processes works best in a team setting. It’s critical to educate your team on new processes so that they can be compliant.
You must build consensus and support among stakeholders at different team levels. For instance, show senior management and the finance department how the changes will benefit the entire company. This way, your plan will be approved because everyone will support it and play their role from an informed position.
5. Train your team
It’s not enough to win your team’s support for your proposed changes. Training your team is vital for implementing said improvements. For instance, train your team members who will use new automated software to operate it. Therefore, your team members will understand why and how they’re doing new things.
6. Collaborate more
It’s critical to build collaboration within your team. Your finance team depends on data from other departments. It’s essential to promote healthy cooperation between this department and other divisions to receive timely information. By collaborating, your entire team will enjoy improved efficiency.
7. Automate and integrate all of your best practices
Automation is another way of accelerating and boosting your finance department’s processes. You can integrate appropriate technology into your manual financial activities for far better returns. You’ll want to gradually implement automation software to get everyone on the same page of a new process.
Automating your financial processes can enhance standardization and visibility. These returns minimize your risks, and lighten your auditor’s workload, and regulate integrated controls. Automation also brings greater value to your business by promoting sustainable growth and efficiency. Some of the key departments that directly benefit from automation software include:
- Purchasing
- Expense management
- Invoicing and accounts receivable
- Accounts payable
- Tax compliance
8. Outsource
Last but not least, you can greatly improve your business’s financial processes by outsourcing some or all of your financial activities to a BPO agency. A recent Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) report shows that outsourcing financial workflows saves businesses money. Although outsourcing may initially reduce a company’s control, a firm eventually enjoys improved control. In addition, BPO firms’ cost and time reduction advantages enable businesses to enjoy improved quality.
A BPO company can provide borderless talent™ that manages a business’s financial processes more efficiently than many in-house teams.
Outsourcing ventures will utilize clear metrics, such as savings and service-level achievements. Consequently, a business enjoys progressive improvements in its accounting and finance operations while focusing on its core activities.
Companies can widen their outsourcing scope to enjoy many benefits by outsourcing multiple financial functions. For instance, if you outsource accounts payable and receivable, you can improve the department’s transactions and see when cash flows in and out. Eventually, your business can optimize available cash and internal processes.
Start your outsourcing journey with Doxa today
Financial processes are so critical that they can make or break a business. These essential workflows are also time and resource-consuming, so they can weigh down a business.
Fortunately, you can improve your enterprise’s financial workflows using various methods. You may leverage technology or hire a BPO company to handle these processes while focusing on your core competencies.
Doxa helps small and mid-sized businesses improve their financial workflows with borderless talent™. Our financial process solutions enable your company to enjoy many benefits, such as reduced operating costs and improving operational efficiency. This way, you enjoy a competitive advantage that sets you on a steady, sustainable growth path.
Additionally, our finance processes management solutions leverage technologies, resources, and capabilities tailored for global competitiveness. Go ahead and contact us today for a free 20-minute consultation to improve your company’s efficiency.
