finance

Automation in Finance: How Process Automation is transforming my role

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The use of technology to automate manual, repetitive tasks can be a game-changer for finance professionals. Typically, a significant portion of time is spent on manual data entry and reconciliation tasks, which not only takes away from the time available for more strategic tasks but also allows for the risk of errors and inefficiencies in work. With the implementation of process automation tools, these manual tasks can be significantly streamlined, allowing for a shift of focus to high-value tasks and competencies.

A recent study, ‘How Financial professionals can leverage advanced technologies to elevate their roles’ by the IMA (Institute of Management Accountants) and Deloitte revealed that for finance professionals to thrive in this new era, they would need to become more strategic and less transactional in their roles by combining human critical thinking and problem-solving, with machine-based functionality and automation.

Benefits of automation in Finance 

1. Manual error and time-saving

One of the most significant benefits of automation in finance is the reduction of manual errors. Manual processes are inherently prone to errors, such as data inaccuracies, typos, and missing information. By automating these processes, the risk of these errors is greatly reduced, saving time and improving the credibility of the financial information provided to the business. This is especially important in an era where data accuracy and transparency are more important than ever.

2. Flexibility to evolve and scale

Another benefit of automation in finance is the ability to access and analyse large amounts of financial data quickly. With process automation tools, finance departments can easily access the data they need to make informed decisions and provide valuable insights into the business. This not only improves efficiency but also assists in a better understanding of the company’s financial performance and identifying areas for improvement. 

The increased visibility of financial data also allows for real-time decision-making, which positively impacts overall performance. Additionally, finance automation can improve scalability, making handling an increasing volume of financial data and transactions easier.

3. Job satisfaction and retention

Process automation allows those in financial roles to focus on more strategic tasks instead of spending their time on routine tasks. With this new technology in place, they can now focus on interpreting data, providing valuable insights to the business, and identifying areas for improvement. In this way, professionals may reach a new level of job satisfaction as their contribution to the company is enhanced. For the business, the added bonus is to attract and retain a workforce that is adaptive and responsive to technological advancements.

Three steps to consider when automating financial processes 

1. Define your current processes

Before implementing an automated system, clearly define your current workflow and approach. You’ll be able to see where there are gaps, if any, and duplications. Many processes contain historical steps that may have become obsolete and irrelevant over time. 

2. Conceptualise your automated workflow

Consider the needs of a finance workflow and how best automation can help. Include tasks, sequencing, and how to assign specific tasks. 

3. Integrate systems

Ensure your systems are operating in unison by communicating and sharing information correctly. Research and identify the best tools to achieve your desired outcome, including cloud-based platforms. 

Final thoughts 

As technology continues to evolve, the impact of automation on finance will only become more pronounced soon. By reducing manual errors, improving the speed and efficiency of decision-making, and allowing finance professionals to focus on more strategic tasks, process automation can transform the role of finance specialists and the finance function as a whole.

AUTTO  is a no-code platform that allows you to transform processes using automated workflows, data tables and integrations. Get in touch and chat about elevating your business for automation today. 

HOW THE DIGITAL GC CAN IMPLEMENT AUTOMATION

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Digitise GC

How the digital GC can implement automation to drive efficiencies across the whole tech business

As the GC (general counsel) of a midmarket tech business you already occupy a trusted seat at the table with the rest of the company’s key business units.  You appreciate the need for your organisation to increase productivity whilst keeping costs low in order to increase your customer base and grow.  You regard your internal stakeholders as your own “customers” and want to deliver a service to increase efficiency, save them time as well as giving your department more time to focus on strategic legal matters. You are part of a technology team so are naturally tech-savvy and you know technology is the way forward, but you’re just not sure how.

Automation may be the key.  

With legal touching every department from sales and marketing to CRM and procurement, you have an overall appreciation of the process challenges your business faces every day and may be best placed to implement automation.

By automating aspects of your legal service delivery you can not only improve department efficiencies but optimise service delivery and free up time to empower staff across your organisation to do what they do best! With the right tools supporting key processes, sales teams have more time to sell, CRM managers have more time to improve the customer experience, lawyers have more time to, well, practice the law! 

We look at some key areas to help you consider digital automation and why: 

    • Contract turnaround time – So much time is wasted by your sales teams, HR, procurement and business divisions struggling to understand which contract templates they should use and then communicating with all parties including legal to get sign off. Empower your sales teams to have the right contracts to share with their customers at their fingertips, reduce the amount of time spent gathering paperwork and shuffling it between sales and legal.  Repurpose the time wasted by teams on contract admin by turning to technology to automate it.  It can take care of the lot –  from customising contracts, sending out notification emails to get other departments connected to obtain the layers of approval required right up to digital signatures.  This frees up significant amounts of time for all parties involved to focus on more strategic initiatives. 
    • NDA’s – similar to contracts
    • Approvals – automating the approvals workflow creates a quicker route to revenue generation. It can massively cut the legal contract process time, resulting in greater overall efficiency and accelerated sales cycles. 
    • Creating an audit trail for compliance – by automating all of these processes, data is gathered in the right place automatically providing an audit trail to prove compliance. At AUTTO we actually use our own software inhouse to ensure and prove all new employees have had the information security training required to honour our own ISO 27001 status!

At AUTTO we are proud to be working with Olive AI, an innovative technology healthcare provider.  Olive’s GC uses AUTTOs to optimise efficiency of commercial contracting, as well as streamlining internal processes to reduce time, improve accuracy and minimise unnecessary paper shuffling associated with such a legally intensive business.  

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your GC, please do get in touch.   

From Excel to interconnected workflows with new AUTTO feature

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From Artificial Lawyer

It just got easier to streamline your data tables. 

Workflow automation company, Autto, has unveiled a new capability that allows you to leverage data tables to build multiple interconnecting workflows that update in real-time, rather than building isolated workflows, each with their own data source. 

As Autto explained to Artificial Lawyer, instead of using traditional, static spreadsheet platforms – such as Excel – in isolation, users of the platform can build and manage data sets within it. 

Co-founder, Ian Gosling said that corporate legal teams and law firms could take an Excel spreadsheet, perhaps that they had used in the past to record key data, move that into Autto’s platform and then run multiple workflows that connect to it. 

There is a growing interest in workflow systems – often referred to as no code or low code platforms – that include for example, Bryter, Neota Logic and Autologyx. 

In many cases these are used by clients to improve one very specific work process, and the ability to build an entire ecosystem of interconnected workflows would appear to be useful. 

As with other platforms of its type, Autto offers an intuitive visual interface that allows a user – without the need for any coding experience – to build a workflow. For example, creating a dialogue box on a desktop to guide a lawyer through a decision process to create a document, complete a form, or to approve an action and move a legal matter forward. 

Elements involved in these workflows can include, among others, triggers to send emails, or for esignature, to create PDFs, to introduce conditional gateways, and to connect to databases – as explored above. 

The goal is not to replace higher value tasks, but to provide ‘the plumbing’, as it were, to enable people to work more efficiently – and to leverage data already inside the business more effectively. 

But, what can be built is really up to the imagination of the users. Such tech can be leveraged to produce quite complex networks of workflows that are central to a business. 

Or, to sum up, as Max Cole, co-founder, said: ‘It has a transformative effect when data can be called on by different workflows.’

Beyond this new capability the company noted that the SME sector has not made much use of automation, even though in many cases it’s not that expensive to utilise workflow tools. 

Artificial Lawyer also asked Cole and Gosling about ‘no code’ i.e. zero coding needed vs ‘low code’ i.e. some coding input needed to build a workflow. 

Gosling replied that they prefer not to think in terms of either, though if they had to pick one it would be no code that best described them. The logic is that talking about code means looking at things from a developer’s perspective. The idea is to focus on data flows that a user is dealing with in their day-to-day work. 

For example, we’d never say: buy this phone, it’s a no-code phone – we just expect there to be no coding involved to use that piece of technology. In short, while there may be a ton of software beavering away behind the scenes, the user just wants things to work. 

 

View full article here

 

Business gets personal.

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Planning for the next decade.

The beginning of a new year is one of those occasions when humanity collectively pauses and reflects. This past decade has seen such rapid adoption of new technology that it’s not unreasonable to claim that the past 10 years could be the most significant since our ancestors started to record history. Nowhere has this impact been greater than for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Technology has leveled the playing field

The rise of mobile platforms and B2B tools has leveled the playing field, making it possible for startups with limited resources to compete with their larger competitors and work as equals with large corporate clients.

Online conferencing shrinks the world

To work internationally companies no longer need satellite offices in different cities. Online tools make it easy to jump on a quick video call with a customer in Paris or the US or a colleague working from home in the same city.

Customer experience is king

Affordable tools provide the data analysis businesses need to improve customer experience (CX) and increase revenue and profits. Organisations and individual staff members can now make decisions based on real data, rather than on assumptions or trial and error.

Empowered employees improve the workplace

Online communities now make it easier for people to research the culture of a prospective employer, to compare workplace stories with employees in other companies and to get the support they need with online tools. An empowered workforce has great potential to create a better, more productive workplace.

What’s next? The decade ahead 

So what’s in store for the next decade? As the pace of innovation continues to soar, we’re already beginning to see adoption of new technology that could have even greater impact on the next 10 years. There seems to be a shift, though, away from technology for technology’s sake towards the end result: how innovation can help organisations focus on greater business goals. Instead of asking: ‘What can the technology do,’ people are asking ‘Why do I need this technology? What can it do for me?’

Virtual and augmented begins to impact business

Over the past decade personalised experience has inched its way into our online lives. Smartphones are the norm. In fact, it’s rare to find someone who doesn’t carry one of these small personalised computers in their pocket, tracking their steps, managing their calendars and connecting them to the people in their lives at all times.

Virtual reality (VR) takes this personal experience a step further, often using mobile technology, to allow users to step into their own digital world. Augmented reality connects users’ real-world environment to this virtual reality.

This all sounds like an elaborate form of entertainment but we’re already beginning to see the impact on business in training scenarios, prototyping and design and customer service. Innovation that further links VR to practical applications could be a big growth sector for this decade.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning shifts

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (MI) have the potential to radically transform business in the next decade. However, this will be the decade where the hype is separated from reality. For example, radical medical discoveries enabled by AI will only be as transformative as the practical day-to-day application of treatment available. Self-driving cars are trending in the media, but an upswell of public opinion could shift this innovation towards a different goal, for example, creating low-cost, zero emissions vehicles.

The internet of things could combine with AI

From cars to watches, to smart homes, the internet of things (IoT) is everywhere. Gartner predicts that 20.4 billion IoT devices will exist this year. This number is expected to increase exponentially over the coming decade. Futurists are predicting a whole new boom in this area: the artificial intelligence of things, combining AI with IoT.

To benefit from these opportunities businesses will be challenged to develop strategies to address possible barriers such as costs, security concerns and new legislation due to changes in political climate.

Meeting the expectations of empowered employees

The next generation of workers are digital natives in every sense. Gen Z, often called Centennials, have been exposed to technology from a very young age. They tend to be technologically proficient with an expectation for high-quality content at all times. They may have less tolerance for uninteresting or stressful jobs and will expect a better life-work balance. This will bring new challenges for leaders in the workplace.

Micro-automation fills the gap

So how can SMEs navigate the minefield of cost vs resource vs need?

Many of the barriers of implementation of large-scale transformation can be addressed with micro-automation. By reframing automation, away from resource intensive technology, such as AI and IOT, micro-automation makes automation accessible to all organisations, no matter what the size.

With online automation solutions, such as AUTTO, SMEs can automate day-to-day business processes within an hour. Routine tasks that may seem simple but in reality cost a lot in time and resource can all be automated, with no technical expertise needed. Tasks such as HR onboarding, approval processes, creating and signing contracts and NDA’s and regulatory compliance processes can easily be automated, giving staff time to prioritise tasks that provide the products and the service that can transform a business.

Using simple automation in this way can revolutionise working practices.

NEW WEBINAR!

An Intro To AUTTO

How to Automate a Complex Process without Writing a Line of Code

  • Date: 31 March 2022
  • Time 14:00 BST
  • Host: Ian Gosling, Founder of AUTTO
register now

Hi there,

AUTTO is a no-code, business and document automation platform. No-code means you can build tailor-made automated processes without having to be a developer.

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