Leveraging technology solutions for improved accuracy and efficiency

In today’s world, technology has become an integral part of the finance function. Every day, more and more businesses are using sophisticated software systems to track their financial data, manage budgets, and analyze trends. With so much information at their fingertips, business leaders must understand how to leverage technology to maximize their financial performance.

Market-leading finance functions are adopting many of the following popular technology solutions, much of which are already widespread across the ecosystem:

These technology applications offer huge benefits as follows:

• Optical Character Recognition: OCR is the process of converting scanned images of text into editable, digital text. This can be useful for everything from digitizing old paper documents to getting text from an image captured by a smartphone.
• Enterprise Resource Planning: ERP is a business process management software that integrates your critical operations into one cohesive system, including sales, marketing, finance, operations, manufacturing and human resources.
• Artificial Intelligence: AI is a way for computers to be able to think and learn like humans. Different types include rule-based systems, decision trees, genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, and fuzzy logic systems.
• Robotic Process Automation: RPA is a form of artificial intelligence that automates repetitive, rules-based digital tasks. Common examples include tasks such as data entry, form filling and document management.
• Digital Transformation: DT can be defined as the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to drive new value for customers and more effectively compete in an ever-changing digital economy.

While technology is continuing to evolve finance functions, it is not happening as fast as it should be due to many factors such as a lack of technology skills, over-reliance on Excel, limited team budgets, and people’s resistance to change. Most people are missing out on relatively easy wins to revolutionize and streamline their operational activities. This restricts their ability to transform the perception of finance and make a bigger impact throughout the business by focusing more time on higher value initiatives.

It can be challenging to implement these technologies into your finance function, and it is essential to plan this carefully to ensure that you select the most appropriate systems applications to support your business requirements. If finance teams can overcome these issues and embrace the power of technology, they will be able to reap the rewards of improved efficiency, accuracy and agility for their finance functions.

The superpower for good technology in finance teams is not to deeply understand every technology; it’s to know how to research, choose and refresh technologies when the opportunity is there. This applies at both a leadership level and an implementer level. You may wish to become familiar with resources that provide early adopter reviews, join communities that help each other with adoption, and experiment with free trials to test the impact of potential options.