Can you automate your accounting – and should you?
Accounting can absolutely be automated, in fact that’s one of our favourite things to do. Accodex Partners work with companies and in-house finance teams to streamline and automate as much of the accounting process as possible. It’s important to think about the accounting value chain and automation as a sliding scale. Over time, as technology improves more and more manual accounting processes are being automated. The humans haven’t been fully removed from everything, and I doubt they will be entirely, but the most time-consuming activities are well on their way to being automated, or at least dramatically improved from an efficiency standpoint.
At the end of the day, the accounting function is a cost centre for most businesses. So it’s in the business’s best interest to make it as lean as possible. From the accountants perspective, I’ve yet to meet an accountant who actually wants to spend all day plugging numbers into holes or copy-pasting from one spreadsheet to another. They want to add value to the business they’re working for, but all too often are bogged down by the minutiae of process work.
“At the end of the day, the accounting function is a cost centre for most businesses.”
Automation and process improvement can go a long way to achieving both parties objectives. I’ve taken the time to go through each area of the accounting function:
| Function | Improvement | Areas |
|---|---|---|
| Bank coding | 50% | Transaction rules, matching and suggested coding |
| Accounts Payable | 50% | Rules, optical character recognition, B2B sync |
| Accounts Receivable | 25% – 50% | Sales engines, B2B sync |
| Payroll | 25% – 75% | Roster, timesheet, salary and benefits software. |
| Month End | 25% | Recurring journals, online workpapers |
| Management Reporting | 50% | Templates and dashboards |
| Budgeting | 25% | Fixed budget and cash flow models |
| Year End Tax | 50% | Workpapers and TB imports |
I think we’re at a point from a technology perspective where most of the highest efficiency software has been produced and is available. It’s now a matter of practices implementing it. We’ve been in this space since 2011 with a 100% cloud firm, so we’re now in the business of looking to the horizon to see what’s coming next.
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Written By: Chris Hooper
Chief Executive Officer
