Using artificial intelligence to automate your business and accounting processes is becoming increasingly more vital when it comes to driving growth within your organisation’s finance and accounting departments. Almost 75% of accounting tasks can be automated with accounting software, which means there is always room to build upon the digitalisation of your current processes. Not only will this mean that your accounting software can learn and understand your organisation’s accounting processes on a deeper level but it will also result in tasks being run accurately and efficiently without the requirement for manual input – saving you and your colleagues a lot of time!
As part of improving your automation, your accounting software will be able to use information from these processes to to track more financial and non-financial metrics. According to a study conducted by Sage, 44% of accounting firms in 2020 were using advanced and predictive analytics that leverage big data, or planned to do so in the next 12 months, which emphasises the importance of keeping up with your competitors’ ability to harness big data and financial analytics. However, internally, ensuring your reporting tools are powerful, adaptable and harness real-time data analytics, will ultimately allow your organisation to define and aid the measurement of progress against operational and strategic goals – supporting you to make better business decisions.
Transforming your organisation’s paper documents into digital assets may have felt like an overwhelming task. However, keeping documents digitally enables a far more flexible approach to document status management, processing and authorising. The workflow or approval process of your finance documents can also be improved by having your documents uploaded digitally into a database or the Cloud. Having digital access to your organisation’s financial documents allows multiple different users in your department or organisation to view/change information before a document is finally committed to the ledger. According to 56% of accountants, accounting technology increased their productivity, highlighting that digitising your accounting documentation can help organisations enhance their collaboration, workflow and approval processes.
At the same time, for many finance and accounting professionals uploading sensitive financial information into the Cloud appeared daunting when it came to compliance with data protection legislation. With the average cost of data breach for companies at $4.24M, the highest it’s been in 17 years, securing your finance and accounting data has never been more important. To help keep your documents safe, it is always good to make sure that your accounting system provider has compliance and ISO accreditation from data centre providers. Also, running multiple regularly scheduled backups, such as database backups and file system and state backups, will mean you always have the latest version of your data available if the worst should happen!
Ultimately, all of these steps to make the most of your organisation’s MTD changes could be solved by switching to a Cloud accounting software provider. In fact, businesses that switched to cloud accounting have experienced a 15% boost in revenue. Nevertheless, to really harness the power of digitally transforming your accounting, ensuring the software that you choose is a ‘true-Cloud’ ERP solution, could be what sets your organisation apart from your competition. Not only does true-Cloud accounting software provide powerful reporting and real-time data capabilities but it allows organisations to access their accounting data from anywhere in the world with just an internet connection and a browser! So no matter how your organisation is set up, whether you have employees working from home, or anywhere around the world, your workflow will be unaffected, driving productivity and growth within your organisation. Find out more about how your organisation can take MTD to the next level and benefit from true-Cloud accounting here.
