Updated November 3, 2020
Smaller accounting teams: welcome to the age of automation!
It goes without saying that recent events have had a considerable impact on businesses over the past few months. Many of them have been forced into temporary and/or permanent lay-offs, and are now obliged to work in small teams.
With a small accounting team, technology becomes your greatest ally. It is becoming a priority to optimize our accounting processes in order to reduce data entry tasks, and to think carefully about our systems and the integrations between them.
The research and development of automated accounting tools using artificial intelligence is exponential, to the delight of businesses. Indeed, the trend is more towards accounting data analysis and business strategy consulting than data entry itself.
Here, we’ll look at how you can automate certain accounting tasks, saving your teams time that they can spend where it really counts.
Accounts payable
In the digital age, paper supplier invoices are a rarity, replaced by digital files. Character recognition tools can be used to read these documents, extract the data and enter it automatically into your accounting systems.
You can also link your e-mail inbox to it, or use mobile applications to take photos of receipts on the spot to avoid delays and oversights. All your documents are thus brought together on the same Web platform, so you can consult them at any time, from anywhere.
When it comes to supplier payments, some applications allow you to connect to your accounting system and your bank simultaneously, so that you can generate and book payments to your suppliers at the same time. These systems use safety standards and approvals that make the process secure and reliable.
Banking connection
The vast majority of financial institutions have teamed up with certain accounting system suppliers to push information securely through their systems. What does it mean? You can access your bank balances and transactions directly from your accounting system. So you can process this type of transaction more quickly.
To make things even more optimal: let’s add artificial intelligence to create automatic accounting rules. No more time-consuming bank reconciliations.
