Picture this: enhanced cost control, cash flow that supports your future business goals, advanced talent retention strategies, simplified audits, and turbocharged productivity. Sounds incredible, doesn’t it? Welcome to the future of finance.
Financial automation promises to be a complete game changer for businesses small and large—if you do it right. We teamed up with BILL to clear the air on this new powerful tool, show you how to eliminate business headaches, and help you scale to new heights.
Here are five ways automation tools can benefit your biz:
1. Visibility: Financial automation gives you enhanced control over costs and superior cash-flow management.
Business owners can’t (and shouldn’t) ignore concerns like inflation and recession. These are tough, morale-crushing challenges that can affect your biz in all kinds of ways.
Fortunately, financial automation offers real-time viz into payables, receivables, spending, and expenses. Oh, and it can also help you set budgetary controls in case your employees go a little overboard with the company card 😉.
Periods of economic downturn call for better cash-flow management. When cash is tight, additional flexibility is crucial to ensuring an adequate flow of funds. Automating your cash-flow solutions allows direct control of outflows and inflows, giving you complete and constant viz into your current cash position, liabilities, and upcoming payments.
Financial automation can be an absolute powerhouse for boosting the performance of your finance team. For one, it streamlines pesky manual tasks like invoice entry, check writing, and reconciliation, helping to slash transaction times.
But here’s the real cherry on top: Financial automation goes beyond boosting efficiency. It leverages AI to spot potential issues within your workflow before they become total tangles. For example, intuitive AI can flag duplicate invoices, learn preferences, and apply them to future workflows, such as populating previously used GL codes when categorizing expenses.
It can also help combat fraud, whether internally or externally. Your team can—and should—enable separate financial duties within an AP team so that two employees have to sign off on each payment.
3. Simplification: Financial automation streamlines the audit process.
Two words that’ll give any biz owner a headache? “Audit time.” From getting your financial records in order to ensuring all your paperwork is in top-notch, audit-ready condition, it’s a huge resource and time drain. The trick to hurdling audit obstacles? Streamlined systems that accurately track and collect financial information, helping you maintain tidy books all year.
Financial automation tools help you better track accounts payable and accounts receivable records so you can actually understand where your money is going. BILL’s Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable use automation to create a permanent record of bills, approvals, and payments with a time-stamped audit trail. That’s right: Every step of the bookkeeping process is tracked, time-stamped, and preserved for years.
4. Talent: Financial automation helps achieve better AP talent retention.
Here’s a tough stat to swallow: One in five AP employees will approach retirement age in the next five years. That means attracting and retaining top-notch talent is more important than ever. The accounting industry is facing an overall labor shortage, and fewer graduates are entering the field, so finance managers are going to have their hands full when it comes to creating work environments that their employees actually want to stay in for the long term.
Financial automation to the rescue! By automating tedious financial processes, you can eliminate manual tasks that frustrate employees in their day-to-day roles and reduce stressors. Say goodbye to audit headaches, bugging your colleagues for completed expense reports, and headache-inducing calculations that push employees away.
5. Flexibility: Automating your finances gives you more flexible payment options.
It’s almost 2024. Payments come in all different shapes and sizes these days, so you’ll need to tailor your biz to this new dynamic landscape if you wanna scale and grow. By configuring your business to seamlessly accept various payment methods, you not only optimize cash flow but also cultivate professional relationships with your vendors, meet critical financial deadlines with ease, and sidestep potential payment hiccups with customers.
Financial automation can organize and streamline multiple payment options, from ACH and paper checks to international payments and even credit cards. By automating your payments, you can create an intricate web of transactions with unparalleled efficiency and clarity. Financial automations offer a gateway to the future of payments and tailor your business to the unique demands of our ever-evolving financial landscape.
The landscape of finance is rapidly evolving, so embracing the power of financial automation with partners like BILL is a strategic must. From enhanced cost control and cash-flow management to turbocharged productivity and streamlined audits, the benefits are substantial. The future demands speed and adaptability, and financial automation is your ticket to success. Ready to take your business to the next level? Let BILL help you reach the top.