Finance and Accounting (F&A) processes play a vital role in running a business, helping track income (and expenditures), ensuring compliance, and delivering accurate financial information that can be used by investors and the management in making critical business decisions.
With digital transformation becoming a norm, businesses are under constant pressure to boost profits while confirming to changing regulatory norms. And although today’s enterprises recognize the strategic role F&A plays in propelling business growth, they have been slow in bringing about the desired transformation of their F&A processes.
Read on to find out why it’s time for you to digitally transform your finance and accounting process and how you can do it successfully!
The lack of digitally transformed F&A processes puts a lot at stake
In the backdrop of the evolving technology landscape, snowballing competition, and escalating customer expectations, organizations must develop broad, cohesive, and end-to-end operating strategies that not only enable profitable growth but also facilitate agility to respond to market disruptions.
In the absence of digitally transformed F&A processes, there’s a lot that is at stake:
- The dependence on mundane, repetitive, manual processes increase the risk of human errors while delaying the time it takes to complete tasks or arrive at a decision.
- Organizations that use traditional legacy solutions in F&A miss out on the benefits of comprehensive data analysis and real-time reporting that hamper the efficiency of their processes.
- Lack of integration between F&A systems and other business operation business systems means they do not have end-to-end visibility into their business or their relationships with vendors and partners.
- Leveraging unclean, irrelevant, and inconsistent data that has been captured over the years means the decisions that are made are poor, erroneous, or just wrong.
- Lack of department-wide governance makes it impossible to keep up with the evolving regulatory landscape or comply with changing rules and regulations.
Why (digitally) transforming F&A processes has become so critical
Given that exponential business growth in today’s digital era is powered by smarter technology, organizations need to invest in tech innovations and digitally transform their F&A processes. Further, most new-age businesses are digitally-driven and almost all of the operational data are captured digitally.
As the market evolves, with such transformation, organizations can
- Enable performance superior to major competitors
- Leverage more customers and drive more business from existing customers
- Make operations more efficient while delivering optimum value to end customers
Through digital transformation, organizations can reimagine their finance processes and ensure they are in alignment with enterprise goals. They can streamline operations, infuse agility through technology, and use analytics to provide intelligence for informed decision- making.
Since digital transformation can help go beyond process efficiency, it can help drive continuous improvements across various F&A processes including: Source to Pay, Order to Cash, Record to Analyze , Compliance Management, and more.
Here’s what organizations can do to ensure a successful transformation
Digital transformation of F&A services can do a lot of good: it can improve visibility into processes, provide actionable insights, and help drive compliance. In addition, it can enhance operational efficiency, increase profitability, optimize costs, and boost employee morale, and improve customer experience.
If you want to undertake proactive business transformation programs to continuously improve the performance of your F&A processes and maintain competitive advantage, here are some tips:
- Assess and align: The first step towards the digital transformation of your F&A processes is to carry out a detailed study of your current state. Getting end-to-end visibility into how you are executing your operations currently and documenting them in detail can help identify systemic issues impacting business performance and the efforts you need to take to overcome these issues. Assess your business processes and your delivery structure and devise a robust change management strategy to carefully align your people, processes, and technology with your business strategy and vision.
- Transcend and transform: As a next step, undertake proactive process transformation to move away from inflexible, manual ways of working to a more wide-reaching, strategically-driven approach to improve how you conduct your F&A processes. Rebuild and revamp your process strategies, embrace modern technologies, and implement solutions that are focused on delivering value and enhancing performance levels.
- Invent and innovate: Digital transformation doesn’t end at just implementing a handful of modern tools. You need to embrace sustained process transformation and constantly innovate your existing business strategies. Envisioning an ideal ‘To Be’ solution will help you in ensuring stated objectives are always met, process owners are constantly trained, and digital transformation initiatives are sustained.
Transforming Finance and Accounting
As organizations get increasingly global, competition gets intense, and the technological landscape constantly matures, the need to stay relevant (and agile) requires the end-to-end transformation of every business function.
Modern accounting software solutions are quickly being embraced by organizations big and small, causing the market to grow at a CAGR of 8.5%. Transforming your F&A processes can deliver a gamut of benefits for your organization: right from improved data analysis to better reporting, automated processes to enhanced decision-making, increased compliance, to seamless, enterprise-wide integration.
But transforming F&A is no mean feat. To achieve unprecedented success, you need to bring in an experienced and proficient partner: through deep industry insight, F&A domain experience, comprehensive understanding of common challenges, and knowledge of best practices, a qualified partner will be able to understand pain points, build a roadmap, and deliver the business outcomes and innovation you need to drive high performance.
