People outside the finance side of the business consider the financial function as a cost center. But the truth is that there is no business in this world that can survive without the Finance department, so it needs to be productive. The more the productive your finance team is, the better your chances of growing your business.

How to Make Your Finance Team Super Productive?

While there are a lot of things out there that you can try out to increase your Finance Team’s productivity, we have hand-picked the most useful ways for you.

1)   Learn from Others

Read up on research, discuss, learn from thought leaders, and attend events to catalog the best practices used by others to attain a level of super productivity. So, it becomes a good practice t learn from the others who have achieved anything in the industry.

2)   Training and Development

There are so many people in a team who don’t want to learn new things by reading up on the best practices. These people will continue to do precisely what they have done in the past, and, therefore, reduce the chances of being more productive.

Here comes the role of a financial leader who must provide training and development for the team. If the team hears and learns the same training and development sessions, then there is a huge opportunity to create a more synergized training process. So, to create a more productive team, your entire team must be on the same page.

3)   Discover the skills of your team

Smooth communication is a must in your team as it also helps in identifying the skills of each and every member of your organization. Extract out what talent they have that wasn’t on their resume. Assign the tasks where they can excel themselves. And thus, the productivity of your finance team will automatically increase.

4)   Automate

Automation is the only way that can increase your finance team’s productivity exponentially.  Automation has taken over through most of the businesses. However, finance teams are still struggling with the same old paperwork, manually filing expenses, accounting entry, etc. In fact, with this methodology, companies incur costs, which are avoidable

Now the question arises: does your team need to be automated? So, let’s find out the answer below:

Signs that show the need for AP automation software

Losing productive time

Manual Billing is a time-consuming process, and even, you can’t rely on it completely. When an invoice is processed manually, there will be no trail left behind apart from a few paper-based records which are vulnerable to get lost, tampered, or crumpled.  In this case, there are chances of Double Payment or data entry, and these processes are almost irreversible.

Inefficient Team

Your finance team feels very bored and mundane after doing a bit of work. It is because of doing the same tasks daily at repetition. And it would be much better if finance teams can use their time to make data-driven decisions by analyzing business spending data.

Inaccurate Data Entry

The process of feeding data manually is prone to errors. Entering a wrong number, or losing an invoice, duplicate payments, or miss crediting an invoice that was paid can uproot the entire financials of the organization and put it under risk. And to fix these errors, you need to spend more precious hours.

Being Future Ready

“Automation is cost-cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting them.” – Haresh Sippy

Everyone knows, in the future, the human being is going to completely automate himself. And, so, there is a need to automate your accounting department. When the financial records are being maintained physically, it is bound to get damaged or tampered, thereby causing a loss of information to the organization. Instead of taking multiple photocopies or storing them in large file cabinets, it’s always advisable to store the records data.

What does Account Payable (AP) automation software do?

• Running a centralized system in the payment system helps you to formalize rate contracts with your vendor, make payments, and process invoices, etc. easily.
• An AP automation software helps you to track the status of all the processed purchase orders, invoices, and pending payments.
• AP automation software allows your finance team to communicate and collaborate more effectively through an internal chat system and address any concerns that arise on the go.
• It makes your finance team audit-ready

Conclusion

Sometimes, you underestimate your finance team. The more productive your finance team is, the better your chances of growing your business—there are so many ways by which you can make your finance super-productive. But, automating them is the best way so that the team can utilize more time in other time taking tasks. One must use the AP automation software to make a better finance team, accuracy of data entry, and ready for the future.