Accidents happen. If you’re working with a manual financial reporting system, with little to no automation, they tend to happen a little more often.
We call this human error, and it happens for a number of reasons:
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Multiple editors of reports, and too much constant churn of information
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Incorrect source data and insufficient checks
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Employee fatigue
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Excessive boredom brought on by manual, tedious processes
Time expenditure on these manual reports is excessive and tends to be pigeon-holed as ‘slog-work’, even by the most patient and precise employees. The process of check-add-delete can reduce even the most accomplished accountant to a gibbering wreck, and causes great discontent in the workplace.
The result of manual processes in your finance department:
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Lack of motivation
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Exhaustion (especially in reporting periods)
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Time away from families (again, especially during reporting periods)
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Less time for problem-solving
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More data processing than analysis, and therefore, less opportunity to be proactive.
It’s little wonder, then, that the errors that crop up in your stakeholder reports or general financial reports are so common in this environment.
Where your staff spend time, and how to optimise efficiency through automation of financial slog-work.
Finding out where you can optimise your organisation to reduce costs is a great start; your ultimate goal, though, should be to optimise how your employees use their time and enable them to contribute more effectively to the organisation by reducing the time spent on drawn-out tasks like compiling data.
The benefit to your bottom-line? Instead of creating a stop-gap to save money, this kind of investment will improve your productivity and optimise your staff budget in the long-run.
We look at how this works below:
How an automated FP&A system can boost your employee productivity:
Financial Performance and Analytics software gives you three solid ways to enable a high-functioning finance department:
- Time savings
The automation of your processes can save your employees up to 75% of their time in reporting periods, allowing them to use their skills more effectively to plan, troubleshoot, and resolve issues as they arise.
What this means for your workforce: A more rewarding experience, and the ability to grow within their roles by learning more, thinking more, and doing more.
- Improvement in data quality and consistency
The improvement in data quality is marked, and once the system is set up correctly, the consistency, reliability, and delivery of this data in an understandable and intelligent format is guaranteed.
What this means for your workforce: Less back-and-forth, more time to study the data and find new avenues of improvement.
- Real-time planning and forecasting
The ability to plan and forecast in real-time – instead of waiting weeks to months for a manual report that changes regularly – gives you the tools you need to improve your performance on the job.
What this means for your workforce: Less frustrating amendments and updates to the same document, over and over again, and a more productive work experience.
Engaging your employees in helpful, productive tasks, and handing the slog-work over to software, allows you to capitalise on your human resources, without wasting your own time or that of your employees.
To find out more about our FPM solutions, or to submit queries about Financial Performance Management that you would like us to cover in this series, let us know by mailing danielmcw@cortell.co.za