Rapid growth always leaves key team members in strategic roles spending too much of their time on non-value-add, manual, repetitive processes, having very little time to focus on the critical aspects of their role.

Automation can give you the key to start clawing back some of that time, but most teams will remain in the manual rut unnecessarily because they don’t know what is possible or how to start implementing change.

The level of automation that can be achieved through platforms like Salesforce and Accounting Seed is an eye-opener. Our clients are “surprised” by what can be automated also frustrated they didn’t do this sooner.

Below are some of the common areas within the Finance/Accounting teams where we see these situations as well as some of the opportunities that exist to fix them.

1) Vendor invoices automatically loaded into your accounting system with 98% accuracy and no human touch

Processing vendor invoices is usually a very manual task. They are received via email, someone prints them out, organizes into neat little piles, and then at some point, it’s some unfortunate soul’s job to manually key them into the accounting system.

Let’s not even mention the manual approval processes we’ve seen many companies still executing.

Invoices can and should be loading themselves into the accounting system. Setup your system to intercept remitted invoices via email, scan through machine learning-enabled technology and you’ll get close to 100% accuracy with all the right details and categorization applied according to your rules.

Sure, it may sound like pie in the sky, but we are yet to find a client we can’t make this work for and in turn saving savings significant hours and eliminating human errors.

2) Vendor invoice payment approval – your rules, your way!

Automating any kind of invoice payment sounds dangerous. And no doubt, your business has complicated payment terms and cashflow considerations to manage.

Skeptical is good, but I’ll challenge you to find a scenario that can’t get the benefit of automation. If somebody is required to go through every invoice, approve them, and then schedule their payment to optimize cash-flow management, you have a real opportunity to significantly reduce the manual labor cost involved.

This is how it works.

In most cases, the majority of vendor invoices are fairly routine and repetitive. Month to month, invoices you receive share many similarities, the same vendors and the same services they relate to.

You are sitting on a high amount of empirical information that with proper analysis and evaluation, you can convert into a bevy of rules and criteria to enable the automation of the approval and scheduling of these payments.

There will be exceptions, a small set of invoices that still require a level of intervention. Automation should be significantly minimizing the level of human touch involved while making light work of the tasks you still need to do.

Once you’ve got vendor invoices approved and scheduled, paying them is a snap. No more manual print runs or stuffing envelopes to send to vendors. You can easily submit these invoices to be paid electronically on a specified date. Payment methods vary, but there are providers that will pay via ACH, temporary debit card, or even take on the process of printing and mailing a check to the few vendors left that require them.

3) Eliminate AR

Don’t worry, we’re not talking about layoffs here.

However, for many companies, the concept of AR can be almost completely eliminated.

It all starts with generating invoices. Regardless of your business model, be it subscriptions, usage-based services/subscriptions, e-commerce transactions, or many others, the technology exists to automate this process. The beauty of Accounting Seed being on Salesforce is that we can build processes that take any billing model you can conceive and bill customers without even having to get out of bed.

And, before you get your morning coffee, you can have these invoices in your customer’s inbox already paid with a $0 balance. With the ability to schedule payment with fully PCI compliant payment providers, you are able to go ahead and charge your customer via Credit Card or ACH automatically.

Now, we get it, not all customers will allow you to go ahead and charge their card. However, you’d be surprised how many existing clients you can convince to allow you do this by extending some form of incentive to them such as a small discount, etc. With new customers, this is just how you do business, and if they kick and scream, you can always handle them as a subset of customers that are the exception.

Yep, that means that literally in a matter of seconds, you can create, pay, and then email your customer an invoice statement with a zero balance and reduce your average outstanding AR to a few seconds.

4) Make Rev Rec an afterthought

Revenue Recognition has become a big deal for many companies. Most everybody we see is still doing this in some very manual, often spreadsheet-based way. If you do any sort of volume in your business, this becomes very tedious and is just simply unnecessary.

Even though are some truly exotic/bespoke ways of performing rev rec, we find that those have evolved from people getting more clever than needed when figuring out how to execute their manual rev rec process.

In most cases, we simply need to look at the product or service and understand how it is delivered to the customer, and define key events that give visibility to when the product or service was delivered or consumed by the customer.

There are a half-dozen or so of very common revenue recognition scenarios and we’ve fully automated all of them. It goes like this:

• Billing is generated and coded to hit your deferred/unearned revenue account
• If the consumption date(s) are known at that time, automate a series of general ledger entries to relieve deferred/unearned revenue and book earned revenue based on those dates
• If the dates are unknown at the time, there are typically other events in the future that trigger the unearned to earned revenue entries. These are either when product ships, when a service is actually performed or partially performed for a customer, etc.

Basically, if there is consistent logic around how you “should” recognize revenue (hint: there should be!) then it can be automated so that nobody in your organization needs to worry about it.

5) For those customers that simply won’t allow you to charge their cards – automate Dunning

Some customers just won’t let you charge their cards. Maybe they are old-school, maybe they just watch their cash like a hawk in a very manual way, or maybe they just haven’t come to the conclusion that there’s a better way.

Whatever the case, you now need to monitor AR for this set of customers and in many cases need to follow-up (re: nag) them to get them to pay their balances.

Large enterprises have had automated Dunning processes for years with some of the larger ERP systems, but this is something that is less prevalent in small business accounting software. That is, software not built on the Salesforce platform.

By using mostly native Salesforce features, we can craft automation to send customers customized/personalized reminders on their outstanding balances on any cadence you can dream up.

In addition to the invoices themselves, we can send outstanding balance statements to customers at 30, 60, 90-day intervals with increasingly stern language (or whatever your strategy may be) to encourage them to pay their bills and prevent them from going to collections.

Obviously, after reading this article, I’m sure you prefer to auto-charge your customers if possible, but if you must go the other route, this is a great safety net that improves cash flow and reduces AR balances.

Summary

As you can see from the items above, there are many opportunities to automate manual, repetitive processes that you may be performing every week or month. These are really just some of the more common items we see over and over. We haven’t even gotten into the automation of key metrics, exception reporting, and other elements of allowing you to become data-driven.

With time being our most valuable resource, there is a tremendous opportunity for all small businesses, especially ones in or preparing for phases of significant growth, to reclaim this time in their organization and make measurable contributions to the bottom line.

The question is then, what could YOUR organization do with these time and cost savings?