Any business owner knows that running a business can oftentimes amount to trying to stay afloat in a sea of mundane day-to-day financial tasks. But maintaining healthy financial structures is crucial to building a healthy business, so what exactly is a business owner supposed to do?

Three words: accounting workflow automation.

By delegating some, or all, of your basic financial tasks to some variety of management software, businesses of all sizes can gain time, save money and reduce errors commonly associated with manual data entry. To help businesses get the most value out of automation we’ve put this guide on the benefits, the key tasks and steps of the accounting process to automate, and much more.

What is accounting workflow automation?

For most companies, the majority of their accounting tasks are handled by employees. Accounting workflow automation takes these tasks and assigns them to some form of accounting automation software that performs them automatically. Automation usually provides a more efficient, instantaneous means of handling the day-to-day tasks of business accounting.

Benefits of Automating Accounting Processes

There are many reasons why accounting system automation is growing more and more popular. We’ll address a few below.

Save time on manual processes

By automating accounting tasks, businesses save a massive amount of time. Where before a company would need to delegate tasks to an employee and then that employee would need to spend a chunk of their day processing invoices or manually paying bills, these tasks are taken care of automatically with accounting system automation. Meaning the time once spent on these tasks can now be used on other, more important jobs that can allow your business to succeed and, eventually grow.

Save money on labor

Accounting is a crucial part of any successful business and this is reflected in large accounting, expensive accounting departments. By automating accounting tasks a business can remove many of the responsibilities usually taken on by employees. This allows a business to either have a smaller, more efficient department (and save money because of it) or more efficiently use their employees' time to create a seamlessly running business.

Save money on errors

Manual accounting can be rife with errors. And when it comes to accounting, errors usually amount to money lost. With accounting automation software, the errors are cut down to next to nothing because the human element (sadly, the defining factor in most errors) has been replaced by accounting automation software and this decreases the potential for errors down to almost nothing. 

Seamlessly run your back office

By eliminating costly errors and delegating time-consuming tasks, any business can greatly improve the efficiency of its accounting department. An efficiently run back office is the foundation for an overall company that runs seamlessly, allowing the focus to be turned away from just managing day-to-day operations and towards building a bigger, better business across the board.

Which Accounting Tasks to Automate in Your Business Workflow

Kicking off your accounting process automation begins with knowing what tasks within your pre-existing process need to be automated. Traditionally, tasks given over to accounting system automation are repetitive tasks that when ran by automation software will be taken care of quickly and without error. 

Managing employee expenses

One of the very basic tasks any piece of accounting management automation software should be able to handle is organizing, managing and analyzing employee expenses. Companies spend too much time chasing down receipts–let alone tallying them–for employee spending and approval. Automation of the accounting process lets employees take snapshots of receipts, compares receipts to company credit card spending, and creates easy-to-use approval workflows.

Payroll management

Payroll can be one of the more arduous, grinding, time-consuming accounting tasks. Automating your payroll makes the process of calculating net pay, sending out employee paychecks, and entering that information into the accounting system entirely hands free, saving any company an immense amount of time.

Financial reconciliation

Comparing your bank statements to your accounting records can be a difficult, error-prone job for nearly anyone. With accounting management automation companies can 2-way sync their bank accounts and accounting records for dynamic, instantaneous reconciliation. This helps to find double entries, flag any glaring (or not-so-glaring) errors, and better detect outside fraud.

Invoice ingestion

Account automation is a stellar solution for repetitive, error-prone tasks like manually entering invoices. Instead of entering each invoice letter-by-letter, number-by-number, account automation software pulls in all the information and instantaneously applies it to your existing balance sheet. 

4 Steps to Start Accounting Workflow Automation Process

To get started automating your accounting processes, there are a few, relatively simple steps:

1. Take a look at your current accounting processes and tools.

The automation of the accounting process should be tailored to your personal needs. Every business is different and every turn towards automation should reflect these differences. Before you even start looking at accounting automation software, take a look at your current account processes and glean some information about which of these processes are costing you the most time. Furthermore, look at your current accounting tools. Are you putting them to their full use? And if not, can any of them solve your current problems?

2. Choose an accounting software best suited to your needs.

Now that you know where your inefficiencies lie, it’s time to choose your accounting automation software. There are many different automation programs to choose from so before doing so, spend some time researching to find the program that fits as many of your needs as possible. A few things to take into consideration when choosing your accounting software: what features your company might need in the short and long term, how big or small your budget might be, what tools you’re already using, and if this program will integrate with these currently existing tools.

3. Figure out a plan for software migration.

You’ve picked your new software and now you need to figure out how you’re going to integrate it into your existing workplace. This means figuring out the basic logistics–how to migrate all of your information and current processes into the new system and when you’re going to do this–and the more complicated ones–labor redundancies, reallocating time, etc.

4. Integrate your new workflows.

Now that you’ve created a plan, it’s time to start integrating. Make sure your team has been communicated the schedule, the outcome, and any changes to their responsibilities on a micro and macro level before doing so. 

Running a business isn’t easy, but through accounting management automation every business can be run in a more effortless fashion. All it takes is a little bit of research, a lot of planning, and the want to improve your efficiency