Streamlining corporate financial processes: Where to implement automation

In many businesses, financial processes still require repetitive, manual work in order to support critical operations. These by-hand processes take valuable time away from employees each day, and can even result in costly and time-consuming human errors that impacts customer or vendor relationships.

Within the finance department, timeliness and accuracy is key. Automating specific processes can help support both of these pursuits, while ensuring that employees’ time can be used for more mission-critical daily tasks.

But where are the most powerful places to implement automation within your company’s financial processes? Let’s take a look, as well as examine the benefits of eliminating manual tasks in favor of advanced, automated solutions:

Vendor payment automation

Maintaining successful relationships with the business’s vendors is a top priority. Any breakdown here could severely impact the supply chain, and by extension, customer services – check out this blog to read further. For these reasons and more, vendor payments are a primary consideration when implementing automation.

A solution like SK Global’s Treasury Automation Suite supports vendor payment automation via Microsoft Dynamics. Leveraging automation in this way can increase security, as payments are transmitted directly from the Dynamics solution to the bank. Best of all, vendor payments can be automated on a global scale using SEPA, ACH, BACS, IAT and more, considerably simplifying processes for organizations that have vendor partners inside and outside of the U.S.

Customer payment automation: Accounts receivable

Accounts receivable is another area of corporate financial operations that can significantly benefit from automation. AR automation can help ensure that unresolved transactions are addressed, and that reconciliation of payments takes place on schedule. In addition, advanced solutions like our Treasury Automation Suite provide powerful features like customer payment matching, summary journal matching, and the creation of GL entries to support payment mapping rules.

According to statistics gathered by Laserfiche contributor Sharon Fisher, AR automation offers substantial advantages for internal financial processes, including:

• 25 percent decrease in past-due payments.
• 38 percent increase in on-time payment rates.
• Up to 25 percent decrease in bad-debt reserves.
• Full return on investment in as little as two months.

Speedy ROI is just one of AR automation’s key advantages.

Accounts payable automation

In addition to automating vendor and customer payments, there are major benefits to automating the accounts payable process. AP automation has caught on quickly in some organizations – while only 7 percent of businesses currently use AP automation for their invoices, 65 percent are planning to implement it within the next two years, according to Certify.

AP automation can save significant time by eliminating manual work for employees. In addition, automating these processes can also boost security and help fight fraud.

SK Global has partnered with SignUp Software to create a true, end-to-end automated AP solution, leveraging SignUp Software’s ExFlow to automate the invoice and approval processes, and our own Banking and Treasury Automation Suite to support secure payment processing. Connect with us today to learn more about our automated solutions and how these can benefit your financial processes.