Every employee has some mundane and repetitive tasks to attend to daily. This makes their work tiresome and uninteresting. Even if they keep up with such work for a long time then it might negatively impact their productivity. No business would ever profit from that.
To cure that, businesses started using automation tools that can help them automate the tedious part of the job and other repetitive tasks. Automation also helps businesses increase their overall productivity and grow their business by many folds. That is the reason why many daily business operations are now getting automated. And one such operation that we are going to talk about today is accounting automation.
Businesses collaborate with experienced finance software developers to build accounting software for them. This software is then used to automate various aspects of accounting operations. If you are not aware or are confused about which accounting tasks need to be automated then you should read this article.
Automation in accounting has been used for a while now if you too are going to do it. Then choose the three processes we discussed in this blog first as they are not only tedious and time-consuming when handled manually, but the margin of human error is also high which can result in a significant loss.
To prevent such losses and work towards gaining profits, you must read this article to understand which accounting processes need to be automated the most and what are its benefits.
Three accounting tasks that accountants should automate
1. Billing and Invoicing
You can’t make money if you are not billing and invoicing your customers, which is a way of charging for your products or services. If there is any mistake in your billing and invoicing process, then there might be a delay in payments or you might not even get paid. So, if you want to keep getting paid, you better improve your billing and invoicing processes.
One way to do that is getting rid of the traditional manual billing processes which were error-prone and rather time-consuming. Because if you made a mistake in your billing processes, you might not just hurt your cash flow but can also harm your relationship with that particular customer.
Adopting automated billing and invoicing can get you paid on time which keeps your cash flow running smoothly. Additionally, accounting softwares is equipped with some interesting features that can help you not only save time on such accounting processes but also help you boost your cash flow. They are as mentioned below:
- Quotes to invoice converters
- Client invoice reminders
- Automated invoices generator
- The ability to save the payment information of the customers
2. Expense tracking and reporting
Times come when the employee and the employer have to make some expenses on the company’s behalf. Managing, tracking, and lastly reporting such expenses can be a very laborious as well as time-consuming process.
When employees make any expenses they have to keep track of it and keep the receipts for reporting. After every regular interval, they have to submit their expense reports which are signed off by someone who holds authority over it. Only after that, the accounting team can reimburse the employee for their expenses.
If this process is automated then a lot of manual work would be taken off the back of employees. Accounting softwares can be used to match the expenses with the receipts and check whether the claims are valid or not.
Until now, many companies used to conduct this process in a manual way but with the advent of the digital age, businesses are now enabling their employees to fill out their expenses automatically in the expense management softwares and keep track of it until they are reimbursed.
3. Bank and credit card reconciliation
Reconciliation is crucial in any accounting process. In it, you have to match your expenses with your credit card bill or your accounting records with your bank’s account statements. It is undertaken to spot and rectify all the discrepancies.
For a while now, human judgment was considered a priority requirement to conduct reconciliation but after automating this accounting process, you will realize that it needs only a little manual intervention and nothing more. Bank and credit card reconciliation tools can check all your records within seconds which is by far very quick and more effective in comparison to traditional labor work.
Automating the bank and credit card reconciliation process can help you with:
- Matching your records with the bank statements
- Flagging double and missing entries.
- Initiating periodic reconciliation that can help you detect fraud in real time.
- Correcting the discrepancies in your records.
How automation improves accuracy and efficiency
- Reduces errors and fraud – Doing repetitive and mundane tasks can make humans more prone to errors. And it is highly likely that if you are in charge of keeping tabs on the cash flow, people will believe you whatever numbers you show. So, automating the accounting processes can not only prevent errors but fraud too.
- Faster processing times – You might have heard the phrase: what humans can do, machines can do it faster. So you can save a lot of time if you automate your accounting operations. This gives you ample time to focus on more pressing issues.
- More accurate data analysis and reporting – Machines and softwares run on programs, unless the code is full of errors, there is no chance a software is going to make a mistake in analyzing the data and reporting about it. So it is bound to be accurate. Also, the software can accomplish the same task within a few minutes for which a human has to gain years of experience.
Conclusion
We hope that after reading this article, you have now understood the importance and benefits of automating repetitive tasks like accounting processes. Apart from preventing errors or frauds that might incur a loss to your business, automating accounting processes can help you increase overall efficiency and productivity which is ultimately beneficial for the growth of your business.
