More and more businesses are realising the benefits automation can bring them and their core departments such as Operations, Support, Marketing, Sales, and of course, Finance.

For a time-starved financial professional, the best processes to automate are those that significantly reduce time spent on repetitive processes, ensure revenue leakage is minimal, that finances are transparent and customer satisfaction is high.

In this post we’ve picked out which are the best processes to automate to achieve these goals.

Invoice Creation

Being able to quickly and easily generate a customer invoice saves many precious minutes (or hours, depending on your processes). Automation allows you to do this in a matter of seconds, and at the click of a button. Automated tasks that produce monthly invoices in bulk don’t even require the click of a button...

In an automated environment, all customer information is stored within a central database. From here, automated workflows allow predefined processes to execute consistently in real-time - all in a matter of moments.

No more painful, manual midnight bill-runs or lengthy ah-hoc invoice creation processes.

Billing

Often a bottleneck between sales and collections, manual billing is time consuming and error prone. Making sure you’re billing customers for the services they are receiving is a key first step to stemming any revenue leakage concerns.

Automated billing removes these manual bottlenecks and errors and ensures each client is being billed correctly for services they are receiving. It also liberates time-starved financial professionals by reducing duplication and simplifying overly complex processes.

Collections

As you well know, your job doesn’t end when the invoices go out. The next challenge is getting customers to pay them on time. Enter - the ‘Collections Agent’.

The first step to an effective collections process is having an accurate list of who hasn’t paid, how much they owe and how long the payment has been outstanding for. This is, very often, at least a partially manual process with unreliable and inaccurate results.

Automating your collections processes ensures accurate and real-time ageing reports from which to manage and streamline your collections process. Payment reminders are also automated, ensuring that those who have outstanding invoices are aware, and reminded to pay before services are automatically suspended.

Here is proof that automation really does work for collections.

Financial Reporting

Gathering all your financial reports at the end of the month or financial year can be a full time job. Even for the best spreadsheet guru’s out there.

An automated platform seamlessly connects your central customer database with other tools such as Provisioning, Collections and Billing. This allows everyone to work from a single source of financial, sales and customer data - enabling faster, more accurate reporting.

Summary

Implementing a fully automated operations platform has a multitude of benefits across your business departments. For the Finance team it means reduced duplication, less complex processes, fewer errors, increased revenue, and increased customer satisfaction. The best way to achieve these results is to automate: invoice creation, billing, collections and financial reporting.

 

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