10 tips to digitize your financial department

10 tips to digitize your financial department

Through this diagram, we would like to give you an overview of the building stones that will help your finance department to further digitalize.

1. Accounting software

The basic foundation of a financial department is a high-performance accounting package. Analytical distribution on cost centers and cost units has become a standard functionality. Equally important, is the ability to integrate your accounting software with other tools. Those with a cloud finance system, enjoy automatic updates without downtime. An additional advantage is the cost-effective & out-of-the-box reliable integration capabilities via API.

2. Bank integration

The daily reading of bank statements and automatic markdowns, as well as the structured notifications provide a nice time-saving in the daily bookkeeping.

Payments generated via an integration from your accounting package, ensure that purchase invoices are immediately balanced in your accounts.

3. Optical Character Recognition

OCR technology is used on purchase invoices to automate much of the manual data entry. Then this information is entered into the finance application. Smart systems even use Machine Learning to suggest the correct entry. Keep the Pareto principle in mind and when rolling this out, first look for the 20% of suppliers that provide the largest volume of invoices.

4. E-invoice

E-invoices (EDI invoices) contain all data in structured information so OCR is not necessary. The data is immediately forwarded for posting to the workflow or the ERP or accounting system. Moreover, a lot of additional automatic checks are possible. When choosing the tool, look at which pre-configured links exist and which suppliers can be activated easily, quickly, error-free and with minimal cost.

Sending invoices digitally equals a more cost-efficient approach.

5. Workforce Expense Management

Mobile tools allow your employees to take photos of their travel and expenses, for example. Their managers can then declare these quickly and easily. Thanks to these tools, expense payments are no longer a manual task in your finance department.

6. Workflow

Workflow for purchase invoices or order forms, ensures that the right information automatically reaches the right person within the company for approval. Upon receipt of the goods, the cost is already visible in the accounting system. If the received invoice matches the order form, it is automatically entered in the accounts. The finance team does not intervene in this entire process.

7. Automated debt chasing & risk analysis

Following up on overdue invoices often requires human intervention. Nevertheless, automatically generated payment reminders combined with an assessment of the payment risk can help you separate the wheat from the chaff.

8. Consolidation

Many consolidation entries can be generated automatically. These include booking the first consolidation differences (goodwill or badwill), eliminating intercompany costs and revenues, receivables and payables, etc.

In addition, the system can help you with equity reconciliation, third-party interest checks, deferred tax calculations, etc.

9. 360° Reporting

As a next generation CFO, you are primarily concerned with analysis and with gaining insights that will help you improve the performance of the company. If we acquire these insights not only on accounting information, but also integrate ERP data, for example, we get a 360° view where all company info and KPIs are centralized. By centralizing, the entire management speaks the same language. This reporting platform with ‘one single version of truth’ generates fixed reports and dashboards that are available to every stakeholder in the cloud.

10. Forecasting & Business Planning

Planning is more than just creating a spreadsheet. Create business scenarios based on your financial and operational data and see the cash impact of each case.