Back Office Automation Benefits
Increases Efficiency: Do More With Less
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Maintaining efficient controls over financial reporting, especially in large organizations with hundreds of unique controls, requires considerable (wo)man-power. Stack that with the statutory deadlines and you have a production challenge that repeats every reporting quarter. Automation of the financial reporting controls has the potential to free up to 10 times the capacity in back-office operations.
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Easy Scalability: Have One Or Have As Many As Needed
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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows for easy scalability for automation of various back-office functions, without heavy reliance on the IT support. Whether using desktop specific automation or a virtual workforce platform, in all cases the deployment and assignment of tasks and processes is under the full control of the back office process owners. Back office process owners are often the ones who sign-off on the respective controls over financial reporting, so they are naturally the ones who get to control the automation assignment, just like they would with the human workforce.
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Faster Financial Reporting Production: Robots Can Sprint A Marathon
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Statutory deadlines often drive back-office teams, at the external-reporting organizations, to seek an uneasy balance between the volume and the accuracy of the work to be completed during the reporting periods. An upset in either direction is a potential risk for such organizations. Fail to get the reporting done by the deadline and risk a fine from the oversight agency. Fail to notice a material error in the financial report and risk another penalty, a company stock impact and even a tarnished business reputation. Automating financial reporting control tasks allows the software to do the few-hours-long human tasks in just a few minutes.
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Eliminates Reporting Process Bottlenecks: Workstations & Robots Don't Need A Lunch Break
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Reporting process bottlenecks happen because none of the teams in an accounting/finance/controlling department operate in a silo. Financial reporting and back-office operations often resemble an assembly line where the teams up the data stream must complete and validate their part of financial reporting before it can be utilized by the teams downstream. Often, multiple teams up-stream simultaneously provide their deliverables to a singular team down-stream creating a bottleneck in the reporting process. Automating these reporting control steps can essentially allow companies to "clone" their employees via additional workstations that can accurately perform the scheduled tasks faster and more efficiently than their human operators.
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Increases Accuracy: Consistent Precision
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Statutory financial reporting deadlines put an ever-increasing pressure on the SEC-filer-organization's human accountants and analysts to get more work done in less time. A natural human tendency is to seek ways to cut corners or face an unfavorable employee review. Cutting corners eventually leads to the decrease in the quality of human work product, with its own set of negative consequences. Automating the mundane, repetitive financial reporting control tasks can deliver 99.99% accuracy the first time, and every single time after that. (The 0.01% error margin relates to the minimum human input part.)
Happier Employees: Boost Job Satisfaction
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Numerous business studies confirm that generally, employee turnover is more expensive for the companies that don't focus on the employee and talent retention. Almost every back-office employee has aspirations for career growth and is looking to gain more experience and do more engaging and higher-value work. In contrast, almost none of the back-office employees are eager to spend long hours every day doing mundane, repetitive tasks, like moving data in Excel spreadsheets. Automation of the mundane, repetitive back-office accounting and reporting tasks, frees up the time for the employees to get to the new projects in the pipeline, to have an enriched professional experience, and diminishes the employee turnover and associated expenses and loss of talent in the organization.
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Enhances Audit Documentation: Lower The Audit Bill
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Every publicly traded organization is required to have its annual financial report to be audited by an independent public accounting firm. In many organizations, external audit teams work on-site year round, and the audit fees can range from thousands to tens of millions of dollars. There is a direct correlation between the quality of back-office accounting documentation, the number of hours the auditors spend auditing it, and the total annual cost of the independent audit to the reporting organizations. Back-office financial reporting controls automation allows for the standardization of the audit documentation, as well as minimization of human errors, exceptions and other nuances that can generate additional charge hours for the external auditors. Back office automation has the potential to materially cut organizations' audit bills.
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Contributes To The Bottom Line: Back Office Automation Adds Value to P&L
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Every Controller knows that the back-office operations (the finance and accounting departments) generally are not revenue-generating centers in most organizations. Yet, in periods when the sales are down, Controllers feel the pressure to 'play ball' and try to make up for the decrease in the area (Sales) outside of their locus of control. So, they cut the budgets of the finance and accounting teams and internal projects. A better alternative would be to automate back-office operations and be able to do up-to ten times more work with the existing labor-hours capacity. Back-office automation has the potential to yield a quantifiable positive impact to the organizations' P&L for which the Controllers can proudly take credit.