Innovation is what leads to growth. For businesses aspiring to achieve rapid growth, this means adopting the latest technologies and meeting the evolving demands of tech-savvy consumers.
While traditional finance systems like on-premise ERPs have their perks, they are also prone to the typical errors that occur with manual labour.
This is why today, even the leading brands—think Apple, Amazon, and Samsung—are adopting financial technology (FinTech) to ensure their operations run as smoothly as possible.
Advancements in FinTech have helped companies increase their operating performance, enabling employees to spend more time on value-added tasks. In fact, studies have found that businesses using FinTech to leverage financial process automation save up to 70% of finance operations costs.
That said, is it a worthy investment for your business?
Here are a few benefits you can reap by leveraging financial process automation by adopting FinTech.
It helps reduce your errors
Reducing manual data entry reduces the error rate in your records. This means you won’t have to deal with contradictory or duplicate records in different parts of your system.
Most SMEs work with limited staff and a limited budget, and it’s natural for human errors to occur when your team has to perform more tasks in less time. But the impact such errors can have on your financial operations may affect your brand reliability and revenue.
Rolling out a process automation system can reduce these errors and increase visibility into your process. If an error occurs, you can trace back your steps and identify the errors, find out when they occurred, and learn how to fix and even avoid them in the future.
FinTech also lowers operational indecisiveness significantly. By streamlining invoicing, payrolls, and reports, you can:
- Identify anomalies
- Close operations and meet operational deadlines sooner
- Keep your customers, employees, and partner companies happy
As you smoothen your operations, you also boost your brand reliability and reputation—crucial factors when building awareness about your business.
It improves collaboration between your teams
By automating finance processes and integrating them with systems and processes in other areas of the organisation— like supply chain, marketing, sales, and human resources—teams across your business can share more consistent and accurate data sets.
Teams performing various job roles can easily access the data needed to perform their responsibilities without waiting for your IT team’s permission. This simplifies project work, allowing the finance department to track expenses for a project and maintain budget records that can be retrieved when necessary.
But what does this mean for the future of your business?
Process automation in financial services enables better control of your financial reserves. It will be far easier to keep expenses from getting out of control, anticipate when additional funding is necessary, and adjust the budgets more smoothly over time.
Increased transparency into your cash flow also improves accountability, reduces disagreements between departments and team members, and builds a better working experience for everyone involved.
It enables better forecasting
Understanding market trends and making educated predictions are key to business growth.
To do this, you need a robust tool that can accurately forecast what to expect and keep your teams updated to allow them to plan for seasonality and growth.
With the insights provided by financial process automation, you can make smarter decisions regarding your finances, strategise ways for cost savings, and deduce where you can allocate more resources.
Better insights guarantee better risk assessment too.
Access to accurate and timely information from every department helps assess scenarios with different variables—interest rate, inflation, or currency fluctuations—and assess potential risks in existing markets and better opportunities in new ones.
With better insights into new opportunities and challenges, you can develop future-proof strategies that deliver a higher ROI and specify new KPIs.
Automation lets you successfully step beyond the traditional metrics and focus on better KPIs for more customer satisfaction, efficient financial risk management, and even better data management to support decision-making.
As you work to establish your place in the market and expand your audience, these metrics can help you build a reliable brand name.
It ensures regulatory compliance
No matter how capable your finance and accounting teams are, it may be difficult to complete financial close quickly, efficiently, and without risk—especially when the market gets more competitive and new regulations are enforced.
In this climate, manual compliance checks can hardly help you meet high standards. One small error when entering data, and you’re left with compliance risks that often go unnoticed until they cause significant damage to your operations.
Leveraging FinTech for the financial close process makes it easier to meet these complex obligations. You can utilise advanced features offered by automation software to ensure your processes comply with the regulations and laws, successfully avoiding reputational damages.
While financial close management may involve a risk of errors, advances in FinTech make managing and mitigating risks much easier. Financial close software also notifies when something is out of place, effectively alerting the respective parties to take action.
Financial process automation can help SMEs scale better
An error-free, streamlined process is at the core of business growth.
SMEs leveraging process automation in financial services can expect accelerated closes, improved productivity, and accurate processes, consequently improving their overall efficiency.
If you have any questions about financial process automation or wish to learn how it can help your business, don’t hesitate to schedule a free consultation with Launchy’s experts.