Many businesses are stuck with former procedures when it gets to accounting.

They rely on Excel spreadsheets, sending them from employee to employee to make updates and publicize those changes. They hold steadfast to manual authorizations, which can seize days, weeks, or months for a simple sign-off from busy executives. And they hold their breath waiting for the impending human error to develop an accounting minefield.

All of this can impede the development of companies.

But accounting automation can unlock the door to better validity.

Automating various accounting and financial operations tasks will direct to smoother operations, saved time, and an adequate bottom line. In this article,

We will share with you four accounting processes that can be automated to lessen mistakes in your accounting department.

Four Processes That Can Be Automated in Accounting

1. Month-End Reporting

This refers to the method and tasks that accounting teams have to perform to close a month of business operations. This method comprises closing the general ledger, reconciling cash accounts, modifying allowance accounts and evaluating income tax outlay for the month. This method occurs periodically and routinely, so it is crucial to get systems in place to do it error-free.

One of the ordinary ways to ease this process is to automatically pull reports from different references and then populate an Excel spreadsheet with the data.

2. Invoice Processing

Every business at every scale possesses the ability to process invoices. Many organizations have accounts payable teams accountable for formulating payments on behalf of the company. This indicates that there are many incoming invoice approval workflows, and having a system to receive, verify, confirm and pay invoices within the correct time frame is significant. Failing to process an invoice in time could result in losing a major supplier or paying interest on accounts payable, depending on the terms from your suppliers.

Because hundreds and occasionally thousands of invoices arrive every month, mistakes can be made if performed manually. This would involve receiving and scanning invoices, reviewing the digital copies, extracting relevant data, manually entering it and then checking for errors. This would take many labor hours if it were done manually.

This is why many businesses opt to automate this method. Some of the means to automate electronic invoicing processing include;

• Utilizing software to automate invoice processing flows to take out invoice data and populate your management software.
• Utilizing invoice cognitive capture software to record electronic and digital editions of the paper and email invoices.
• Utilizing robotic process automation (RPA) to take out relevant data from emails, log in to vendor applications, retrieve invoice information, and inscribe data into invoice processing software.

3. Expense Reporting

Expense reporting is one of the extensively detailed things in accounting’s workflow. On top of that, the average cost to generate one expense report is about 27 dollars. With automation, this could go for as low as 5 dollars per report.

Expense reporting can handily be automated with expense automation software or RPA. With RPA, you can automate the process of logging expenses, attaching corresponding receipts to each expense entry, and checking the expense and receipts logs to assess that no blunder has been made.

4. Payroll Management

Managing employee payroll is also tiresome for an accounting team and can occur as repeatedly as every week. It comprises tasks like scheduling payments with your bank, computing the right amounts to pay out and diminishing and giving up per contractual obligations. You also have to accept the numerous state and federal payroll management and reporting regulations.

All these tasks are monotonous to execute manually, and errors are easy to make. Therefore, one of the most worthwhile means to automate payroll management is by using RPA. Robots can enforce most payroll management tasks like calculating bonuses and holiday pay, complying with tax requirements and calculating the reasonable deductions for each employee.

Conclusion

We all understand that automation eliminates the need for mundane and manual accounting tasks. Many other tasks can be automated in addition to those mentioned above, such as order processing, call center operations, data transfers, etc.