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Finance Department Business Process Optimization

By 24th July 2021July 30th, 2021Digitalisation

All businesses are trying to increase revenue and reduce costs in an increasingly competitive environment. This has resulted in staff feeling increased pressure to deliver products and services faster, better and more cost-efficiently without compromising on quality. Any business growth however comes with increased operational costs. It is therefore critical that a business’s truly wanting to see sustainable growth in profitability, market share, and success, place emphasis and a focused eye on their business processes, efficiencies, and their use of technology. This can play a critical role in a business’s success or failure.  Remaining relevant with technology in today’s age will be a company’s competitive advantage.  

Our Business Process assessments have revealed that many work environments are still fraught with redundant processes that are inefficient and that waste time, resources, and money to fulfill. Most staff never challenge the current processes in their line of business, which can cost the company dearly.  This however can be changed by driving a culture of continuous improvement in the workplace, where staff is encouraged to bring innovative and fresh ideas to the table that will result in improved processes and efficiencies. All Businesses should aim to simplify their daily and monotonous tasks by refining, digitising, and automating processes so that their businesses can remain relevant, competitive, and profitable.  

A common misconception in business is that they appoint internal teams with the “required” expertise, skills, experience, and technology knowledge to lead their business digital transformation journey in the hopes that this will save them time, money. This approach, however, fails often due to most internal teams being under-resourced, lacking business process skills, and them not being experts in technologies like process automation tools, process robotics, IoT technology, and applications that can truly advance business process optimisation exponentially.  This often sets a business back and can also result in massive losses if investments are made into the incorrect technology.    

For this reason, we have developed a wide range of business process optimisation solutions that can assist with designing, developing, and implementing bespoke solutions that will ensure business success in transforming their business processes, ensuring that their businesses remain relevant, efficient, profitable, and compliant.   

What is Business Process Optimization? 

Business Process Optimization is the analysis of any repeatable process or manual task for the desired creation of digital technologies to remove unnecessary and complex steps. Where human intervention is required to produce, deliver goods and services, there will always be an opportunity to streamline operations with software. 

Business Process Optimization is gaining significant traction and is set to become a critical component in solving key business challenges. At Green Office, we target certain areas of the business where business process optimization will make the most impact. The implementation of optimization technologies in your finance department would greatly improve the efficiency and reliability of many tasks. 

Finance Department Optimization 

The Green office goals. 

  1. Enable businesses to conduct and manage record-based transactions without paper. 
  2. Create digital platforms that help businesses digitise, automate, and refine approval workflows which result in reduced time spent on tasks such as capturing, scanning, printing, indexing documents, filing, and sending follow-up emails.
  3. Reducing the total cost of ownership of each transaction within the finance department, to ensure the finance team runs optimally and cost-efficiently. 
  4. Improved efficiency, up to 75% of all administrative roles are occupied with doing repetitive tasks that can easily be automated. By saving staff up to 75% of their time, allows businesses to get optimal results from their teams.  

Process Optimization is extremely beneficial when it comes to streamlining the Finance business processes which are present in every business. 

Financial processing, requests, and approvals can be challenging. Most financial tasks consist of many processes that need to be followed and managed well to ensure compliance. Most finance department leverage software tools available to them like excel, email, ERP systems, accounting packages and/or record-keeping systems which result in information silo’s that creates a lack of transparency into a process, making them hard to manage.   

 The approval process is often another inefficient process that all finance departments must follow. Most finance teams still must manually collect and match up all transaction data, which is related to purchases, which is often very time-consuming. Then comes the vetting and assessing of the data and finally the requirement of a signature. This lengthy process can result in time delays, wasteful printing, inefficiencies, slow supplier payments, and a lack of visibility.  and this impacts greatly on a finance team’s efficiencies and effectiveness.   

By implementing a digital approval process, a business can immediately see improved efficiencies, higher accuracy, and improved effectiveness in their finance departments as all wasteful processes are automated and digitised. Businesses will also benefit from improved compliance as all regulatory checks can be built into a process.  

Other areas of a finance department requiring optimization are tedious, and repetitive data capture. Manual data entry is a highly inefficient process that consumes time and resources, as well as can result in high inaccuracy.   In a recent survey, our clients have reported “receiving invoices in paper format as the biggest challenge and risk they face”. 

By using an effective digital scanning and OCR solution, a business can scan in their invoices and push all the required data on the invoices directly into their accounting software seamlessly.  Additionally, there are also workflow tools that can be used to do verification matching of all supplier invoices to purchase orders. These tools can optimise a finance department’s efficiency by up to 75%, which will have a positive impact on any business.  

The management, tracking, and storage of documents can also be challenging for a finance team when using a manual system. During financial audits, the retrieval of documents needs to be simple and easy, which is not the case with manual data storage systems as retrieving records may take time A manual system also inhibits a company from gathering insights into their data and being able to quickly review their financial data to form a business decision on such as spending patterns, productivity, and operational efficiency. By digitising and automating a business’s financial processes, the availability to create transparent and real-time data for management reporting becomes possible, with integrating your workflows with Business reporting tools.   

For more information on our bespoke digital solutions, that will guarantee you fast results, fill in the contact form below