What accountant doesn't recall being stuck in the office late on a Friday night crunching numbers and finalizing overdue reports? After spending hours scouring reports in all the formats—Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word docs and even handwritten sticky notes—you'd go back in and search for the specific data points for the final report. It was basically like curating a special edition of Where's Waldo? and then trying to find where you actually put Waldo.
Thankfully, tech keeps evolving and taking menial tasks off our plates. Certainly, there are plenty of bots and AI tools that can gather and organize data for you. However, recently when talking with CFOs from prospective clients who have decided to select promising sophisticated accounting systems, I've seen a trend that worries me—they think their process is automated when it's really not.
Where's the automation?
Just like trying to find Waldo, you need patience and a keen eye to find where and when you can add automation to a process. Having most (if not all) of your processes automated challenges the status quo. Every day, more and more platforms emerge with their own flair and specialty to automate various areas of your business.
You may be thinking, "I've already got my Excel templates and reports ready to go." Yes, template-based data extraction is very common, but that's only dipping your toe in the vast pool of automated possibilities. If an employee is still working on even a piece of the project, then you're only partially automated.
Think about how much time and eye strain you'll save your employees by having a tool that does the data scouring for them. Optical character recognition (OCR) technology allows you to turn images of typed, printed or even handwritten words into machine-encoded text. It's like your computer looks at an image and tells you what's written within it. Although OCR tech does scan the text, it doesn't know what to do with that information. This is where your employee comes back in—they decide what to do with the data collected.
Now imagine you want to take it a step further and implement additional automation prior to your employee review that incorporates machine learning and deep learning in order to learn and improve on its performance over time. In addition to AI-backed technology almost fully automating the data entry of documents like invoices, you can find dynamic workflow tools that automate the review, matching, approval and accounting record integration into the general ledger steps of your business process.
Even if your process isn't solely linear, you can decide on the parameters and combine them with a task map to complete the entire handling, including mapping the proper data to the proper fields. Automating these standard tasks keeps employees available to troubleshoot any anomalies.
Three Steps To Start Your Complete Automation
You don't have to do a full-scale digital transformation to benefit from automation that's "truly automated." Here are some easy suggestions to start you moving in the right direction.
- Document your processes. Start documenting every step your process requires from start to finish. Yes, it's tedious, but this helps create a foundation for identifying the things you can replace manpower with tech power. We are creatures of habit. Processes are an accumulation of our habits—how we do each step, when we start the next step and what the final product should look like. If you can document a process, you can probably automate it.
- Find the tools that fit. Whether or not you decide a tool with smart data extraction works well for your process, you can do as you need. Creating a system of various AIs with machine learning capabilities allows you to unload some of the mundane things from your employees so they can focus on more important matters.
- Bridge the data gaps. APIs and webhooks allow you to share data between platforms without you having to lift a finger. For example, connecting your accounts payable automation solution with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) accounting system allows you to automatically control your spending in real time and contribute to cash flow management. Instead of waiting to receive invoices and integrate them manually, you create efficiencies and get hours of your day back.
While relying on template extraction and outsourcing data entry may seem like a quick fix, for now, the truth is that the competition will likely eventually outpace you if you stick to your manual or partially automated solutions. As they say, there's no time like the present to get started. After all, if there's a tool that can find Waldo in under five seconds, there's a tool out there that can automate your business.
This article was originally published to Forbes.com as a part of their Forbes Business Council on November 29, 2022 and authored by Yooz CEO Laurent Charpentier.
