Finding ways to increase productivity is key if you work in finance. Planning accurate budgets and spending reports within tight timelines is the hallmark of a capable professional and is sure to win favors in the world of work.
However, rushing through financial reports isn’t always the smartest idea — even the most capable accountants make mistakes. You may find that your desire to meet demanding deadlines undermines your ability to make accurate plans and reports.
The financial industry’s low tolerance for mistakes means you should seriously consider automating at least some portion of your daily workflow. Simple automation tools can improve your collaboration with other departments and enhance your effectiveness within the financial team.
Benefits of Automation
Automating your expense tracking or budgeting can seem like a risky move. After all, accurately reporting costs can keep a business afloat when it comes time to claim expenses as tax relief. However, when leveraged correctly, automation should increase the accuracy of your work and save you time.
Every business should stay up to date with technology. Automation can provide all the following to those who dare to introduce it to their workflow:
- Cut Costs: Saving time by working more efficiently can help you find time to cut costs across the business and reduce the risk of expensive mistakes.
- Save Time: Automated tools that take care of mundane tasks free up time in your schedule. This makes your work more manageable and can spark a period of professional growth in your career.
- Productivity: When you aren’t spending all day manually inputting expenses, you can spend more time on tasks that meaningfully improve business operations and overall productivity.
- Competitive Edge: Customers love working with firms at the forefront of innovation. Though every tool you use may not be a success, showing that you’re up to date with tech can land you new clients.
Additionally, switching to automated workflows can improve collaboration and boost morale among your team. Even simple changes — like autoresponse emails — can free up time, minimize the risk of human error, and create a more productive workplace.
Cloud Tools
Utilizing the cloud is almost essential in the modern age of finance. Working with the cloud ensures everyone can access the same files simultaneously, ensuring visibility and transparency across your company. This can be important if you do any accounting work, particularly if people need to quickly and easily access the same information, and also need that information to be up-to-date. Features associated with cloud-based accounting software include:
- Storing and reviewing financial statements from anywhere;
- Secure storage thanks to enhanced levels of security when storing in the cloud;
- Easily replicated invoices, reports, and templates;
- Organized workflows across your whole team;
- Improved collaboration and communication with clients and coworkers.
Integrating the cloud into your current workflow is easy, as it requires little infrastructure to implement. Services like Google Drive give your team access to templates they can use to produce reports and allow employees to work from almost anywhere in the world. You don’t need to worry about pushing updates or backing up your work, as the cloud encrypts your data and creates a series of saved work as you progress.
Building Effective Workflows
Automating some of your work is a great way to improve finance processes, boost overall productivity, and minimize the risk of human error. However, to make the most of cutting-edge tech, you must ensure everyone is on board with the changes. The best way to do this is to slowly roll out automation so everyone can get used to the new tools available to them.
Get the ball rolling by building a tech-driven, automated process flow for tasks like expense tracking and tax reporting. You can build effective process flows by:
- Stylizing your diagrams to increase the clarity of the proposed process;
- Using meaningful formatting tools to aid visual learners;
- Saving your diagram to the cloud and allow users to add comments as they discover new tricks or happen upon roadblocks;
- Using status updates to keep communication high;
- Breaking up larger projects (like “submit quarterly tax report”) into smaller processes (like “calculate expenses for April”).
This approach ensures you effectively leverage visual aids and can help clients and employees see the status of an ongoing project. Further, you don’t need to make process flows from scratch, either. You can make use of workflow project boards on programs like Asana, Trello, and Monday. Just ensure that the workflow project board you use integrates well with the rest of your tech stack before installing new apps to everyone’s devices.
Conclusion
Automating your workflow can save time, improve collaboration, and reduce the risk of human error. However, if you do decide to automate your financial reporting, you’ll need to choose a program that’s both intuitive to use and integrates with the rest of your tech stack. Using automated tools can increase efficiency at the workplace and empower your coworkers to achieve their potential.
