Processing financial data takes too much time — how can we fix this?

According to a study involving finance leaders, finance teams spend half of their week on transaction processing. This means from Monday morning to Wednesday lunchtime, they ensure that customers receive accurate invoices, bills are paid, and fixed assets are accounted for.

While these tasks keep money flowing through the company, the C-suite insists that they need fast, accurate, and reliable data on the financial impact of different strategic moves. When the financial year is halfway over, and they need to boost the company’s performance, they want to know the cost impact of picking strategy B over C and A.

However, when the finance department spends half its time on transactions, it doesn’t have nearly enough time to provide accurate data to support strategic decision-making.

Why are finance teams still struggling with manual processes?

To complete their workload, finance teams have to work with data from different systems and sources that are often inaccurate, incomplete, and sometimes inaccessible. 76% of participants in a survey indicated they spend one to three hours daily moving data around. ERP systems are marketed as comprehensive reporting solutions, but they are only one of many data inputs required to understand business performance.

Suppose the finance team wants to modify a report or compare it to data from other systems. In that case, they usually have to loop in IT to effect the changes or create manual extracts. This dependency results in frustrations and delays.

Manual reporting processes rob finance teams of the ability to conduct valuable analysis. This makes them ill-prepared to present actionable insights to the managing board, leading to the company’s lack of adaptability and responsiveness, which is necessary to thrive.

Disadvantages of manual processing

Several aspects of manual processing contribute to the crippling strategic planning. These include:

Inaccurate information

Even the best finance teams are prone to make mistakes during manual data entry and processing. These mistakes are often a result of stress, distractions, fatigue, and boredom. A study determined a 4% error rate for manual processing, with 14% of these errors containing potentially harmful discrepancies. When working with large tables of data, these mistakes compound, and the time spent fixing the errors increases. In fact, companies spend about 12 hours every week fixing data entry errors. Even worse, 83% of workers spend between one and three hours daily fixing errors.

Costs and resourcing

Manually processes don’t scale well, meaning you’ll have to keep expanding headcount just to maintain outdated workflows. If you can successfully make the case for adding new talent, the cost of finding, training, and onboarding is steep. More often, leaders find it’s hard to justify adding new hires without clear incremental value, which means small Finance teams get more and more overburdened and burnt out.

What automating financial data processing looks like

It’s clear that manual data processes are inefficient, costly, and affect the company’s bottom line. With the expanded CFO responsibilities, you’ll need a tool that facilitates the timely presentation of accurate and reliable data. This is where automation comes in.

Automation can help ease many of your problems through:

• Data integration — This includes consolidating data from different sources like databases, ERP systems, APIs, and cloud services in real-time to guarantee that data is always up-to-date on a single platform.
• Data preparation — Cleaning, transforming, and adding value to data requires skill and consistency. Unfortunately, it’s time-consuming. Automation will handle a large portion of identifying and correcting anomalies and eliminating manual processes.
• Data reporting — You’ll have access to pre-built templates and customizable dashboards for generating specific reports.
• Data governance — Automation ensures data compliance with industry regulations. The system tracks data audits and changes automatically, helping you maintain accountability and transparency while reducing the workload associated with compliance.

Take the leap

Preql has the technology and capabilities to free up your time and improve efficiency across the board. Book a session with our team for a demo to understand how we can help free up your finance team’s time and resources.