Nine Things Every Small Business Should Automate
Automation software for small businesses can be a game-changer. Here are the top tasks your team should start automating today.
Small business automation software is everywhere. Yet, organizations are still feeling the strain of running finance and accounting tasks manually.
Manual accounting and finance work isn't just time-consuming, it's expensive.
Here are the average costs businesses incur for some of the most common, everyday tasks:
And, all of these everyday tasks tackle different components of an organization's finance and accounting process. Automating one doesn't eliminate the costs of another.
On top of that, factor in the most common complaint business owners, founders and Chief Financial Officers have - there is no complete overview of company finance and accounting data.
It's nearly impossible to see bills, receipts, reimbursements, payments and vendors in one place.
Every day finance tasks are stuck midway between multiple automation tools - all of which process data differently - and piles of flawed, easily misplaced spreadsheets.
The annual CFO Indicator Report, found that 85% of CFOs said their teams spent the majority of their time on non-value-added tasks, like gathering data, checking data accuracy and building reports. And, on top of that, they revealed only 17% of their team's time is actually spent on strategy-driven work.
There are so many productivity gaps automation can bridge.
Read on to discover how automation software can benefit essential areas of your small or scaling business: accounting, accounts payable, bookkeeping, fraud detection, expense management and more...
Businesses have expenses. And, to stay in business, those expenses need to be paid. Unfortunately, as businesses grow, so do their expenses and so does the work required to get those expenses paid.
Without small business automation, accounts payable can easily become a full-time job. That means, on top of the expenses a business already needs to pay, they need to pay an AP clerk to process them or take time out of their controller's schedule. That drastically increases the cost per invoice.
With automation, bills can be paid entirely hands-free and instantly. Even if your business pays by check (which 80% of small businesses still do), automated payments platforms like Corpay One can process check payments for you, sending them right to your vendor. Even better? You can further automate and accelerate the payments process with DirectPay - that's an instant, no-fee accounts payable option.
Your business can maintain excellent vendor relationships, without the overhead of manually processing and paying expenses.
If employees were to rank the day-to-day tasks from best to worst, submitting expense reports would be dead last. It's one of the most common frustrations at organizations across the globe.
The average team member takes about an hour to prepare an expense report. And, they wait an average of 30 days to get reimbursed. That's a long time for a company to owe money to an employee. It's long enough to build resentment and increase frustration - especially when team members often have multiple expense reports to submit weekly.
And, even if they are using a software tool to automatically scan receipts and bills, those tools rarely fill in every field. Employees are leaving the organization open to error and are spending more time than needed filling in fields a software tool could fill for them.
By using an automated expense reporting system, like Corpay One, your team can eliminate the manual work of getting reimbursed and scan, approve and organize expenses instantly. From scanning and printing and waiting - to just a few clicks. Plus, payments are initiated an average of one day after submission - rather than weeks later.
At Corpay One, we've heard expense approval horror stories. In 2020, organizations are still asking their employees to manually scan receipts and invoices. Then, their process includes printing the document, putting it on someone's desk to sign and then, scanning it again.
Paper piles up. Expenses are delayed. Vendors are missing payments. Employees are waiting weeks for reimbursements.
This system is flawed at every step. Even if your team is using a small business automation tool, you still need a more sophisticated system to account for internal compliance and sending expenses to multiple approvers.
Every busy small business owner knows about "the bag." This is the bag of receipts and bills and other important expense documents business owners dump on their bookkeeper or accountants desk near the end of the financial year.
And the bag? It's only filled after hours and hours of scrambling through every desk drawer to find every last, crumpled receipt. Even then, documents go unaccounted for - which presents audit risks or reduces the total expenses a business can claim.
With a tool that automatically scans receipts and bills, while instantly adding essential data (think, category, branch, department, etc...), bookkeeping is automated.
You can reduce bookkeeping hours, while eliminating the stress of filling "the bag."
The average value of a duplicate bill is over $2,000. Pay the same bill twice - even just one time - and your business is looking at a pretty substantial loss. Business owners don't often realize they've made the error until it's much too late - especially when it's on the vendor to come clean.
Small businesses don't have the same intricate financial systems and organized finance teams larger enterprises do. They also have less financial resources to lose in the case of a duplicate payment.
Using an automation tool to scan, flag, and reject duplicate bills eliminates this kind of financial risk.
Fraud, particularly internal fraud, is one of the greatest risks to businesses. In fact, internal fraud happens most often at smaller businesses with 100 employees or less.
Trusted employees can find gaps in security and oversight, taking advantage of their employer. This often happens through methods like check tampering, altering payment information for vendors, or submitting false documents.
When an organization goes entirely digital - and automated - with their payments and reimbursement processes, it becomes more difficult for fraud to sneak by. For example, Corpay One combats internal fraud by creating an instant audit trail for every bill, reimbursement and vendor profile. You can see every interaction a team member has with a payment-related item, with the ability to instantly flag suspicious behaviour.
Reporting is what finance teams spend the majority of their time doing.
They are stuck between multiple softwares and spreadsheets - trying to marry data together and determine one source of truth. It's a flawed and frustrating process.
The modern cloud accounting system is built to be the ultimate source of truth for businesses. It's where you can determine exactly how much money your organization brought in and exactly how much you had to spend to make that happen.
Tools like Corpay One are designed to work as a layer on top of your accounting system, feeding all of the data for each expense, along with a complete picture of every document, to your accounting system in real time. That means you should never see a discrepancy between how much you have in accounts payable in Corpay One and your accounting system.
Manual data entry is inherently flawed. Even the most innocent errors can result in major discrepancies, losses or irretrievable time spent. When it comes to payments, small businesses shouldn't put the integrity of their data or financial health at the whim of human error (the human race has achieved so many things, but flawlessly entering manual data isn't one of them).
Take, for example, an expense inaccurately entered at $1,000 - when the actual cost is only $100. A payments clerk, lacking the context of the team member, may initialize the payment. A vendor, either knowingly or unknowingly, accepts. One extra zero can result in paying 900% more than necessary. For a small business, that's a major loss.
And, it's not just monetary loss. It takes the same amount of time to correct an inaccurate expense report as it does to file an expense report in the first place. That's double the people hours and productive time spent on just one task.
Automation software solves data entry errors by effectively eliminating data entry.
For every bill, there's a vendor. And, vendors are rarely uniform in their expectations. They have different payment methods they accept. They have different styles of invoicing. You offer them different payment terms.
It's easy for a task like vendor management to require a full-time manager to organize vendors and align vendor expectations with accounts payable.
Automated vendor management eliminates the tactical management work. Automation can be used to extract vendor details and payment requirements from invoices. Then, that information is used to automatically pay the vendor according to their payment method and payment due date.
Corpay One is a bill pay solution for small-and-medium-sized businesses. Picture your bank’s bill pay - only smarter, with built-in bookkeeping and approval workflows that work for your team. This is one effortless platform, designed to save you time, money and help you focus on what counts. For accountants and bookkeepers, Corpay One’s Advisors platform is the only platform to truly automate client accounting services. Get started today - for free.
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