Today’s accountants and finance professionals are responsible for much more than just handling basic money matters. Creating strategy, driving process improvements and analysing data to make valuable decisions are the kinds of tasks these professionals are now expected to manage. In order to stay on top of the business environment which is ever-growing more complex, many tools have been developed to enable organisations to outsource low-value adding tasks to a software application.
Accounting and finance professionals are crucial to driving strategy and future business growth and should be at the heart of an organisation’s innovation. But according to a recent BlackLine survey conducted by Censuswide, many mid to large sized company decision-makers are not entirely leveraging this talent.
In many companies, professionals are still manually reconciling accounts, developing excel sheets and matching transactions, which results in little time left for value-adding tasks. These manual processes and repetitive tasks take up too much time and result in valuable skill sets being widely underutilised. Instead, a software solution can be used to automate the manual accounting work that consumes most of the accountants’ time and effort, allowing you to unlock the value of your people.
Providing accountants with assistive technology leads to higher productivity, increased accuracy and generates actionable insights. When manual processes are automated, accounting and finance teams spend fewer hours on transactional activities. This enables employees to shift focus towards analysing data, viewing reports in a broader context and addressing only the exceptions. Most professionals relish the opportunity to spend less time on tedious lower order tasks and more time on higher order, value-adding work. Ultimately, greater productivity, more ideas and higher motivation will contribute to giving your business the edge in your industry.
To operate a business’s finance function, providing decision-makers with historical data used to be enough. However, today, companies expect to have access to predictive data and forecasts.
Software solutions like BOARD, tableau or IBM can turn big data into concise, decision-driving insights. Engaged businesses are already implementing these software solutions and providing training to their accountant/data scientists. With software solutions becoming the norm, accountants looking toward the future need to have both a theoretical and practical understanding of data and analytics. Additionally, we expect a basic understanding of the technology itself and the ability to adapt to a changing environment will be the new standard.
By investing in information technology, not only will your business become more competitive but also your employees. Information technology enables accountants to provide high-value services in areas such as fraud detection, compliance, data analytics, technology, and consulting.
Allowing professionals to apply their expertise to the bigger picture of financial activities and broaden their knowledge of information technology will create an exciting challenge and more motivated and engaged employees.
Change might seem scary when looking at it from a distance, but it is important to keep in mind that if you do not create change, change will create you. By initiating change and adopting new technology into business processes, organisations can benefit tremendously internally and externally.