Finance departments are the beating heart of any business – ensuring their efficient and effective operation is critical to a firm’s performance.
While many companies have been quick to apply cutting-edge technology – such as AI and automation – to their customer-facing operations, many are still yet to fully capitalise on the technology’s potential in their back-office, including in finance and accounting processes.
Here’s how we’re helping our clients unlock significant benefits by applying technology to transform their finance functions.
Unlocking efficiencies: saving time and money
Finance processes can be highly labour-intensive – requiring the handling of large volumes of often repetitive tasks and always demanding perfect attention to detail.
When done manually, or through old, legacy systems, this can be a significant drain on team capacity – and correspondingly carry a high cost in terms of valuable human resource.
Technology can help tackle this problem head-on.
Automation can shoulder time-consuming time-intensive jobs, working quickly and securely through large volumes of work – around the clock – in the same way that a human team member would, while requiring minimal human input.
This saves finances departments a significant amount of time, which can instead be spent on more valuable, strategic tasks that require the creative and decision-making skills that are uniquely human.
And, through its efficiency, technology can also significantly reduce cost-per-process. For example, at Parseq, our automation-driven invoice processing typically saves businesses 20% on the cost of their own in-house solutions.
Delivering operational insight
Alongside time and cost savings, integrating technology within finance systems can help boost firms’ insight into their own operational functions.
Relying on paper-based processes, or non-integrated digital legacy systems, can mean that creating and delivering financial reports takes a significant amount of time to deliver, with room for details to be overlook, or missed opportunities for synthesising information to generate new insights.
Technological solutions can help bridge the divide between data formats – such as paper-based and digital documentation – and bring together systems and processes to help finance departments quickly achieve a full picture of a firm’s financial health.
For example, our management accounts service allows businesses to automatically generate monthly, weekly or daily management accounts, prepared and customized to their needs. Real time data is available through a digital portal – which allows customisable KPIs, benchmarking, forecasting and budgeting – providing an exceptional level of insight and financial, and non-financial, performance reporting.
Importantly, firms can also combine our management accounts service with other Parseq finance and accounting services, such as credit management, invoice processing and payroll/HR admin, for a fully outsourced Finance Team, with even greater efficiency and value.
Supporting customer experience and operational health
Errors can naturally arise in finance and accounting processes – particularly during busy periods, and when teams are manually processing work.
As well as taking extra time to review and resolve, mistakes can be costly from a reputational perspective. Customers may be followed-up for payments that have already been made; there can be delays in allocating payments to customer accounts and suppliers might not be paid in a timely manner – all factors that will put pressure on critical external relationships.
Automating processes such as credit management and accounts payable can help significantly reduce the risk of errors – and their associated reputational consequences.
It can also help support firms’ wider operational health. Delays in finance processes can have implications for cash flow – reducing the risk of hold-ups or bottlenecks can help bolster firms’ financial flexibility, ultimately supporting their ability to capitalise on new opportunities, and weather downturns in trading.
Looking ahead
Knowing the right technology solutions to apply to finance and accounting processes can be difficult. But, by working with a partner with the expertise in designing bespoke, tech-led solutions, firms can ensure that they are implementing solutions that will deliver for them.
At Parseq, our experts work with businesses across sectors, and of all sizes, to use technology to transform finance operations. Get in touch to discover more about how we can help you.
