When your business is growing rapidly, there’s a lot to celebrate. But growth also brings its challenges — especially when growth is outpacing your hiring.
As businesses grow, finance teams often find their workload expanding much faster than their budget or their team. More customer orders mean additional money flowing in and out — which also means more financial transactions to process and more strategic decisions to make. At some point, it gets hard to keep up with the volume, but you may not be in the position to expand your finance and accounting team yet.
But this tension doesn’t have to slow down business expansion. Technology that automates your finances helps you accomplish more with less. By taking over routine and time-consuming tasks, finance teams can shift their focus to strategic activities that propel growth.
So, how can you keep growing your business with the same resources you currently have? Consider implementing automation technology to take some of the pressure off your finance team.
When automating your company’s finances makes sense
When you’re focused on growth — and keeping your head above water — you may not always know the exact moment when implementing technology would be worthwhile. Here are a few ways to tell if your finance team could benefit from financial automation:
- Team members make a lot of mistakes when processing financial transactions.
- Financial professionals spend more time on manual, repetitive tasks than strategic thinking.
- Your billing cycles are extended.
- You can’t see the big financial picture because you lack complete data.
- You worry more about financial processes, procedures, and systems than attracting new customers.
- You know you don’t have the tools or resources to scale with your enterprise.
Fortunately, by leveraging automation technology, you can modernize your accounting workflows and continue to scale your business without hiring more staff or incurring other significant expenses.
The benefits of automation
Streamlined processes
Without automation, someone has to touch every invoice, bank statement, or financial document and manually enter the information onto a spreadsheet or into your accounting software. The process is repetitive, time-consuming, and mind-numbing, leaving you with little bandwidth to explore, interpret, and use the data to make decisions.
Automation tools can help you streamline many financial processes, including invoicing, payroll, and bank reconciliation. Once a tool gets implemented, you and your team will have a lot more time to focus on tasks that move the business forward.
The Thames Valley Family Health Team experienced this firsthand. Once the staff implemented an automation solution, they went from handling 50 invoices a month to 150 to 200 invoices every two weeks. Plus, with the newfound time on their hands, the team onboarded several new payees to expand the medical group’s services.
Increased accuracy and compliance
Even the most conscientious employees make mistakes from time to time. Unfortunately, those errors can cost your company time and money, particularly when you’re dealing with accounts receivable and accounts payable.
If you forget to send an invoice, you delay the inbound cash flow your company needs to grow. If you miss a vendor bill, you may incur a late charge. In either case, it takes time to identify and correct your oversight.
Fortunately, automated financial processes occur without requiring human intervention, resulting in fewer mistakes. Plus, since automated systems are designed to follow protocols, every transaction processed will adhere to the appropriate standards, ensuring your firm’s compliance with industry regulations.
Real-time financial reporting
As a business owner, you have to make countless decisions every day. However, it’s tough to make informed choices when you don’t have digestible data at your fingertips — especially when it comes to creating a strategic financial plan.
With an automation tool, you can run real-time, data-rich reports, like cash flow statements, to guide your thinking. This immediate, on-demand insight into your company’s financial health is crucial for making quick and informed decisions that enable your enterprise to grow.
Cost reduction
Implementing a financial automation solution can cut your operational costs significantly in two ways:
- Hourly employees will spend less time manually processing invoices and other documents, potentially lowering your payroll expense.
- You won’t need to hire as many team members to handle an increased workload, protecting your bottom line.
As a bonus, an automation tool can reduce the number of unpaid invoices you have, instantly boosting your revenue.
Efficient, steady growth
If you told your finance team to expect their invoice volume to triple over the next quarter, they’d probably be pretty nervous. However, your automated tool could continue processing every transaction normally without missing a beat.
Automated solutions are inherently scalable. With the right one in place, your company can handle an ever-increasing volume of transactions without linear increases in resources or personnel.
How Plooto can help
We know that scaling your business is both exciting and challenging. Automation technology is a practical and efficient way to grow, so you won’t need to hire new employees whenever the workload gets too heavy for your existing staff.
Plooto is your mission control centre for cash management, enabling you to accomplish more with fewer resources. We can help you quickly, accurately, and affordably approve invoices, pay vendors, receive payments, and more. Plus, working in tandem with your existing accounting software, Plooto’s reports will help facilitate sound financial decision-making, paving the way for continued growth.
Try Plooto free for 30 days and see first-hand the impact automation can have on your business.
