In addition to leading the Finance function, today’s Finance leaders are expected to drive both top- and bottom-line growth across all areas of the business – from improving the customer experience to using technology for innovation.
Finance has long been recognized as a driver of reducing costs within an organization. More recently, however, it has become an innovator within the organization. According to The Hackett Group’s latest benchmarking data, world-class organizations continue to enjoy a significant cost advantage over peers and in 2018, the G&A cost as a percentage of revenue for world-class organizations was 28 percent lower than that of their peers.
Today’s CFOs are taking more strategic roles in their organizations and identifying areas where they can gain efficiencies. By automating labour-intensive Finance processes such as Accounts Receivable, Finance leaders have an opportunity to materially improve the customer experience and simultaneously drive revenue.
Whether you receive cheques from customers or have transitioned to entirely electronic forms of payment, remittance processes still require manual work and too much paper. The average Finance worker spends about 50 percent of their time processing transactions. Part of the problem is that filling out all that paperwork is a time-consuming endeavour. In fact, an IDC workflow study commissioned by Ricoh found that 58 percent of businesses still rely on paper documents for critical business processes. Adopting technologies such as AR automation can make this far more efficient, provide usable data while substantially improving your bottom line. Imagine if your team could devote less time — or no time at all— to dull, repetitive tasks… what would you have them focus on? Strategy? Special projects? Positive customer interactions?
World-class Finance departments deliver their services at a 46% lower cost with 52% fewer staff. But more than just cost savings, these Finance leaders are using the information that flows through their department to offer strategic business insights and create competitive advantages for the entire organization.
Click here to enjoy the rest of our AR Automation eBook and learn how other Finance leaders have improved customer experience and employee engagement, leveraged big data analytics, maintained business continuity, and created a competitive advantage.
