What Is Wrong With Your Finance Processes and How You Can Fix Them?

It’s 2022 and process inefficiency is not something that a rapidly growing company can afford to tolerate. Especially, when customer expectations are rising, digital adopters are gaining a competitive edge, and there is constant pressure to optimize operations while reducing costs. For any business undergoing transformation, optimizing finance processes seems like an ideal place to start. When businesses optimize their finance processes, they are bound to identify improvement opportunities in workforce productivity, compliance, and risk management.    

Common Barriers to Optimizing Finance Processes

There are a few common challenges that account payable, account receivable, and procurement teams face. According to the recent Efficiency Benchmarks Report, account payable teams at businesses with moderate invoice volume clear only 25 percent of purchase order in time when everything is done manually. With automation, the number increases to 42 percent.

In account receivables, more companies have reported that they are getting paid severely late. In a recent survey, 22 of the 228 participating industries said that more than 10% of their aging dollars are 90+ days past due. Procurement processes are not faring any better. Inefficient processes are increasing operational costs and draining profits. 

How To Transform Your Financial Processes

To improve any process, you need to have X-ray-like visibility into the end-to-end execution. This is where an automated process discovery tool comes in. Unlike the manual discovery approach, automated discovery leverages advanced technology to capture time-stamped logs of events spread across processes, applications, and business functions.

This level of transparency into your finance processes helps business leaders identify gaps and inefficiencies and the impact areas. For example, a couple of manual price adjustments in an invoice might not seem like an efficiency drainer. But, imagine the undesired manual work that will be required for high-volume invoice processing throughout the year. Now, that is a cost overhead you don’t want.

Optimize Your Finance Processes with SurfaceAI

SurfaceAI is an AI-enabled automated process discovery tool that provides complete visibility into “AS-IS” processes to empower business leaders like you to make informed decisions to get more benefits.

We’ve designed our software to not only uncover hidden process improvement opportunities but also point to the triggers such as variations and deviations that cause inefficiencies. Our tool automatically documents end-to-end processes and visualizes them as process flows. Business leaders can use these insights to design the next best steps – automation, consolidation, and elimination of processes.

Gartner notes that 80% of finance leaders have shared that they have already implemented or are planning to implement RPA. However, to get the best returns on automation investment, you must go beyond low-hanging fruits and automate processes that bring the most value.

With SurfaceAI in place, you can orchestrate finance processes across departments to improve cash flow and reduce inefficiencies. So whether you want to ensure on-time payments, eliminate late collections, or improve overall operational efficiency, SurfaceAI has got you covered. Want to see how you can transform your finance processes with SurfaceAI? Talk to us today