Your finances are one of the biggest factors that influence the direction of your business. To reduce the risk of human error, save time, costs, and overhead, your financial processes need to be top-notch.
Imagine if there was a way to automate your finance processes, some sort of financial workflow that made things easier…what would that look like for you?
In this guide, I’ll be discussing financial workflows — what they are, why they’re vital for smooth sailing as a business owner, and how outsourcing them improves efficiency and can actually cut costs and save you big.
What Is A Financial Workflow?
You probably already know that a workflow is the sequence of steps that make up different work processes. Workflows take these processes and make them more productive and more efficient. In turn, efficient workflows add value to your business’s activities.
Financial workflows need to be a part of your business processes.
They move things from point A to point B smoothly and without errors. What’s more, they help you define what needs to be done and in what order you should complete the tasks.
If you haven’t automated your financial workflows, it’s time to start. Some examples of basic financial workflows include…
- Purchasing management
- Accounts Payable
- Billing and Accounts Receivable
- Inventory management
- ACH/Wire requests
- Expense reimbursement
- End of month reporting
- Employee operations
- Fixed asset management
… and more.
Although they seem simple, these business processes can be tedious, and if done incorrectly, they leave too much room for error. In fact, according to the Journal of Accountancy, if a business doesn’t have optimized workflows, staff members spend too much time performing data entry and stressing over remaining compliant.
Accounting relies on effective workflows to streamline tasks and economic processes to increase productivity.
5 Benefits of Automating Your Financial Workflows
Whether you’re a two-person show or a large company, recording, organizing, and maintaining financial workflows can lead to stress, forgotten tasks, and chances of being non-compliant. We don’t want that for you.
Leverage your time by streamlining financial workflows that stop you (and your employees) from focusing on your business strategy and stay ahead of the competition.
Digitalizing accounts can be scary, and we get it if you’re not convinced that it’s the best move for your business, which is why we’re sharing the top reasons why automating your financial workflows is a must.
Gain Insight into Your Business
By mapping out your processes, you can get a clearer view of your business. No matter how established your business processes are, how do you know if they’re getting results? Do the methods need to be improved?
Financial workflows give you insights into your processes to gain more efficiency and profits.
Bookkeeping Made Easy
Are you used to piles of receipts and hours of verifying purchases with no end in sight? These are issues that can be prevented by automating your bookkeeping. By outsourcing and automating your bookkeeping, you not only reduce costs but increase efficiency.
Efficiency
Automating financial workflows minimizes room for error and increases your business productivity.
Financial workflows can help you minimize unnecessary steps or redundancies. By having more insight into your business and the processes, you can get a better picture of what is necessary and where you can “tighten up.”
Spend less time inputting data, and spend more time interpreting data. Automating your financial workflows gives you the ability to harness these interpretations to make better business decisions.
Compliance
Compliance issues lead to major headaches. Keeping up with and implementing ever-changing regulations can be extremely labor-intensive, and it puts your business at higher risk of human errors. Automating financial workflows can:
- Reduce the risk of regulatory guidelines breaches
- Track review/sign off procedures more efficiently
- Keep on top of deadlines — never miss an expiry date again
Proper financial workflow management has endless advantages.
Forecast Future Financial Obligations
Unsure if you’re ready to launch a new product or expand your business? Proper financial workflow management allows your business to better prepare for the future by understanding your current financial position. Insight into your current situation allows you to forecast for the future. . Forecasting gives you access to information like:
- What you should be spending
- What you can afford to spend
- Whether your business has the potential to succeed and potential problem areas
Without strong workflows, quickly looking at data and determining overestimated cashflows, or under pricing based on unproven profitability assumptions , becomes a challenge. Remember, the quality of your input determines the quality of your output. Think: Garbage in, garbage out — bad inputs result in bad outputs.
Although your forecasts may not always be accurate, they better prepare your business for the ups and downs it may face. With automated financial workflow management, you’re able to see years of data at a glance and make quick decisions based on the information.
Factors to Consider When Determining if Outsourcing Financial Workflow Management is Right For Your Business
- Cost: We live in a technology-driven time where there are tons of different software options available to business owners to decrease error and increase efficiency, but that technology can get costly — especially if you aren’t sure how to use the software. Automating your processes by outsourcing with an experienced bookkeeper will save you money in the long run by providing the oversight needed to properly manage technology.
- Errors: Are numbers not adding up from month to month? Do you spend more time trying to fix accounting errors and less time running your business? This is a tell-tell sign it’s time to outsource.
- Improved Decision Making: businesses that plan their cash flow more frequently have a higher survival rate than those that do it annually. To run a successful business, you need to know how much money is coming in and how much money is going out to make informed decisions. Outsourcing helps make these decisions promptly and with accuracy.
Ready to Automate Your Financial Workflows?
If taking the time to understand and analyze your financial workflows seems like a tedious task, it’s understandable.
Your business and your finances constantly need your attention.
Outsourcing your workflow management is the ideal way to understand:
- Inefficiencies in your financial workflow processes
- Ways to simplify and streamline your financial workflows
Have peace of mind and get back to building your business by automating your financial workflows. Ready to learn more about how we can help? Book a call with Automated Accounting today.
