Accounting is an essential back-office operation, yet the profession is often labeled under the list of dull and dreary jobs. Unfortunately, that’s the harsh truth. The activities involved in accounting can bore one to death, and it is easy to commit errors in that mundane state of mind. Even though regarded as the 42nd best job, only one-third of the accounting professionals are satisfied.
The solution to this overarching problem is accounting automation; you have to automate the ordinary and repetitive process, maintaining your accountant’s sanity for essential tasks and ultimately avoiding the ‘death by accounting.’ Nearly 9 out of 10 accountants believe that their profession needs to pick up the pace with automation adoption.
In this post, we’ll share 6 accounting processes that should be automated right away to help your accountants.
#1 Expense Management
Collecting receipts from your employees is neither easy nor fun. In fact, it’s a time-consuming, repetitive, and never-ending process. At the same time, it is unavoidable as many of your employees have to reimburse for their company expenses. You can help your accountant by eliminating the need to track the spending via paper receipts. And the best way to do it – use an expense automation tool.
With this tool, the employees can upload the snapshots of their receipt immediately after the spending, and the accountant can quickly approve it and forward the data for bookkeeping. The tool also helps with the expense filling and approval process and takes the data directly to other platforms, thus eliminating the need for copy/pasting. In addition, it can keep the employee under the loop by notifying the employees about the progress of their reimbursements.
#2 Payroll Management
For an accountant, payroll is the most mind-numbing and time-consuming bookkeeping task. The process requires sorting the employees in terms of their pay scale, calculating working hours and overtime, deductions, taxes, etc.
By automating the payroll management process, the accountant can easily calculate each employee’s net pay, their overtime, and disburse paychecks with a mouse click. If any tax document or data is missing, the automated tool can instantly notify the employee to submit the same, ensuring minimum delays in paycheck disbursements.
#3 Bank Reconciliation
Another essential task of an accountant is bank reconciliation. The task involves matching the accounting records to bank account statements. If there are any irregularities, the accountant needs to spot them and correct the differences.
Bank reconciliation is usually a very common feature in most automated accounting applications. It automatically fetches transactions from the accounts and quickly generates bank reconciliation reports. Also, matching the accountant’s books and the bank statements can be done instantly. It always flags double entries, identifies inconsistencies, and detects malpractices in real-time.
#4 Accounts Receivable
Accounts received is what others owe you. It is the lifeblood of any business, and if it goes wrong, it will directly affect the revenue stream. This aspect of accounting involves issuing and tracking invoices and working with multiple teams such as finance, sales, marketing, operations, and customer service. It requires approval from the authorities, thus leading to a lot of delays and human errors.
Automating this process will help the accountant receive the payment faster with minimum effort. Automated accounts receivable tools will help to extract reports automatically for unpaid invoices and initiate payment collection. It will also help to generate accurate invoices in relation to the sales records, facilitate quick approvals, and trigger payment reminders for the clients.
#5 Accounts Payable
Accounts payable is what you owe others. A payment delay can cost you additional fees and a bad reputation with the client. Some may even end up stating you as a defaulter. The management of payable accounts involves complex steps that create unnecessary delays and bottlenecks for an accountant.
If the accounts payable are automated completely, it will help the accountant extract invoices and automatically trigger the sign-off process from the relevant departments. The automation also helps the accountant collect the bills in a central repository, automate the invoice approval process payment initiation, and easily add the transactions to the accounting software.
#6 Tax Compliance & Financial Reporting
For an accountant, tax season is stressful as it involves financial reports preparation and tax obligation calculation. These reports and calculations are often challenging for the stakeholders to understand as they don’t have an accounting background and require the accountant to provide valuable insights.
By automating the tax compliance and financial reporting process, the accountant can update taxes based on the regions and current rates effortlessly, thus prepare a hassle-free tax return. It also helps to create financial statements and predict future revenue. A very tedious process suddenly turns into a simple, accurate, and efficient process. The stakeholders can also easily get valuable insights from the easy-to-understand reports extracted from the automated software.
Conclusion
Automating these 6 accounting processes will help save time, improve productivity, elevate data accuracy, boost data retrieval, secure file storage, and enable real-time integration. In summary, bringing automation into your accounting system will greatly improve the productivity of your accountants, who can spend more time on creative and decisive tasks.
If you’re interested in exploring Intelligent Automation to enhance your firm’s accounting process, Rapid Acceleration Partners would be glad to help. Our next-gen, AI-powered content intelligence platform RAPFlow enables full lifecycle AI orchestration on a single platform. When used in tandem with our RPA tool RAPBot, it provides end-to-end workflow automation capabilities that can be deployed in just weeks. You can even build your own use case and the platform can easily integrate with your existing systems. Book a demo to get a more detailed understanding of how our products can transform your business.
