Redesigning Job Roles With Autonomous Finance before 2023

Humans + Machines to Re-Shape the Future of Finance

It’s 2022, and finance teams are still continuing to rely on manual methods and legacy systems to complete their workflows. Many finance professionals continue to depend on sticky notes, notepads, spreadsheets, and communication that is limited to phone call reminders. These ‘tools’ aren’t helping your finance teams do their jobs efficiently, and may even lead to burnout. These nuances are far from the ‘job description’ that keeps finance teams excited to be at work every morning. 

Even from a business impact standpoint, manual accounting practices are unsustainable – especially in these turbulent economic times. For example, it is estimated that accounting teams of one to ten people spend 10,000 hours each year manually completing accounting tasks. It amounts to about $300,000 in payroll costs per year, a cost that grows exponentially with business operations. 

When financial processes are manually managed, data is stored and shared inefficiently and is hard to find when you need it. Finance teams need data from a number of different places, such as ERPs, bank lockboxes, and spreadsheets. But as they collect data manually, it takes longer and is less accurate because there isn’t a system that helps bring all the data together on a single platform. This leads to erroneous or incomplete insights. 

According to an EY study, 65 percent of finance leaders said having standardized and automated processes—with agility and quality built into those processes—was a significant priority.

With autonomous finance, you can change how jobs are done 

Traditional B2B automation software is OUT. CFOs need to move to a  robust, AI-powered autonomous finance software to make the CFO’s office agile and efficient. By automating time-intensive processes like cash positioning and reconciliation, payment collections, and invoice management, finance teams can reduce manual intervention and errors. 

Automation also enables finance teams to close books and make reports faster. It also enables finance teams to have more visibility into their day-to-day transactional activities. This gives the office of the CFO more time to focus on the strategic and high-value tasks at hand.

Source: Hackett Group

Automation tools enable finance teams to access and retrieve essential information from unstructured data sources and collaborate more easily with cross-functional teams. Ultimately, these tools help your teams eliminate redundant manual processes and save time and operational expenditure. By digitally transforming finance processes, businesses can scale and set out on a road of continuous development.

HighRadius’ Autonomous Finance Solution for the office of the CFO

HighRadius’ Autonomous Finance solution is a data-driven platform that can deliver intelligence and an ultimate experience for the office of the CFO. HighRadius’ suite of solutions include autonomous receivables for order-to-cash(O2C) processes, autonomous treasury for treasury processes, and autonomous accounting for record-to-report (R2R) processes.

Why should you opt for Autonomous Finance before 2023

Why delay modernizing the office of the CFO with the right automation tools when you can do it TODAY?

Industry-specific data-driven software that leverages big data and intelligence will be game-changing for the office of the CFO. Here’s how HighRadius’ Autonomous Finance is helping finance teams move beyond basic automation to meet and exceed today’s standards:

• 100% real-time credit risk monitoring to ensure lower bad debt
• 70% lower invoicing costs with automated invoice delivery
• 95% straight-through cash posting and automated deduction coding
• 75% faster receivables recovery with AI-based worklist prioritization
• 95% cash forecast accuracy for every category across multiple horizons
• 40% reduction in month-end close time with connected workspace

Top organizations in the world are already forging ahead with autonomous finance and are thriving. If your B2B software has only evolved from paper and filing cabinets to electronic systems of record, you need to accelerate your digital transformation efforts to catch up with the leading players in the market.

Autonomous software solutions enable finance teams to access real-time financial data, find anomalies and seek vital trends that can impact the business. Automation makes a future possible where finance teams can focus on strategy, business growth, and success. And it enables executives to analyze every analyst’s productivity, along with 360-degree visibility into their business’s global process health.

Retain and hire top talent: The optimal fintech stack to redefine finance jobs

When your CFO’s office is equipped with real-time data analytics and predictive tools, you’ll be able to effortlessly ensure compliance and greater flexibility in financial planning. CFOs need to leverage this new work environment and use finance technology roadmaps to engage staff and redefine job roles.

Redesign your finance team’s top five laborious tasks with autonomous finance solutions

In this section, we look at the five complex workflows and how they can be redesigned with autonomous solutions.

#1 Non-productive, time-consuming activities in everyday work

HighRadius’ Autonomous Finance solution offers you 100+ out-of-box dashboards and reports powered by artificial intelligence(AI) to simplify the monitoring of receivables performance globally. The CFO’s office can then examine the finance team’s productivity in greater detail. Read more.

#2 Longer turnaround time owing to siloed workflows and lack of team collaboration

Solve this challenge by implementing AI digital assistants such as Freeda, the AI-enabled virtual assistant from HighRadius. Freeda allows collaboration with team members using chat functionality to exchange messages, screenshots, and documents. Record-to-report analysts can share their work papers for each general ledger account task category for review and approval. Exciting! Isn’t it? To see Freeda in action, you can request a demo here.

#3 Time-consuming, compromised data analysis and ineffective decision-making because of disparate data sources

Get started by automating data gathering. With autonomous finance, you can
extract data automatically from internal and external data sources. For example, the analytics engine can help treasury teams automatically recalculate forecasts and variances to make reports and dashboards that support faster decision-making.

#4 Ill-defined and vague process flows that consume majority of the employee bandwidth for low-value tasks

With autonomous finance software, you can get AI-based prioritized worklists for faster receivables recovery. It also supports customized dunning strategies with AI-recommended actions and ‘promise to pay’ analysis in collections. Eliminates manual blocked order resolution by leveraging AI to analyze past order patterns and payment behavior.

#5 Manually catering to customer needs across time zones and work schedules

Overcome this with customer self-service portals that enable low-touch buyer onboarding through email invites, self-registration, and single sign-on(SSO). Lets customers schedule payments, pay in installments or make partial payments. Automatically collect payment details post payment.

The business transformation story: The impact of redesigning job roles

Ardent Mills is North America’s leading flour supplier, producing multi-use flours, whole grains, and ingredients. They have operations & services supported by more than 40 flour mills & bakery-mix facilities and over 1,100 customers nationwide. Their most significant difficulties were around cash application, managing deductions, and collections. Their cash application process was entirely manual and they were paying a lot of money unnecessarily as lockbox fees. They lacked worklist prioritization, a central repository for customer communications, and transparency in operations. The system that they used did not cater to their customers’ needs and did not support multiple languages. 

How did Autonomous Finance help Ardent Mills?

• Eased up the remittance aggregation process, freeing up time for their analysts. We also allowed collectors to post remittance information directly into the system
• Enabled collectors to analyze and access payment files for real-time risk monitoring for correspondence and collections
• Provided a better employee experience
• Enabled easy collaboration across various teams to get more visibility into their end-to-end process
• Seamlessly pivoted from one method of escalation to another

Check the entire story to understand how we enabled Ardent Mills’ finance teams to redesign the job roles for their staff and improve productivity and satisfaction.

Going Above And Beyond with Autonomous Finance

HighRadius Autonomous Software delivers measurable business outcomes such as DSO reduction, working capital optimization, bad-debt reduction, reduced month-end close timelines, and improved productivity. The Autonomous Finance platform is currently available for three key parts of the Office of the CFO: Autonomous Receivables for Order to Cash, Autonomous Treasury for Treasury and Risk Management, and Autonomous Accounting for Record to Report.

If you are ready to redesign finance roles for your team, request a demo NOW! Else, you may end up missing the competitive edge that 58% of businesses are planning to achieve before the end of 2022.