In our latest blog post, we explore the benefits of making your finance team as paper-free as you can.
In our heavily digitized world, there are still many fields that rely on paper-based processes to help carry out their operations.
We aren’t talking about ballot counting in the US elections here – that’s had more than enough attention recently.
But what about the many shared services, internal audit, and other finance functions in organisations for whom paper stills does much of the heavy lifting?
The extent of just how pervasive paper-based process can be are not always known within organisations.
A client of ours in the manufacturing sector sought out AccessPay for this very reason. As a Treasury risk & reporting specialist, he was horrified to discover just how much time his shared services departments spent manually keying bank statements in to their ERP systems. He had a similar reaction when they realised how much time internal audit teams spent travelling to multiple sites to dig through paper-based authorizations stored in archives.
The inefficiency, risk, and labour-intensive nature of paper-based processes is undesirable at the best of times, but the pandemic has made the quest for ‘a better way’ even more pressing.
In fact, a recent report from Gartner showed that in organizations that have not yet gone fully paperless, shared services leaders view billing and customer payment processing as the two most important priorities to address.
All valid in theory, but talk of any type of automation and cost-savings at precarious economic times are bound to spur some difficult internal conversations, with employees clutching onto those trusty pieces of paper for dear life.
However, what we have witnessed first-hand in helping our customers automate their paper-based processes is that the very same paper-championing employees have been unleashed onto more value-add activities and more enhanced job roles.
With an internally improved control environment of standardised and digitised processes, significant benefits are felt across the board.
From increased security and reduced fraud risk, to the streamlining of the number of connections to banks and online electronic banking systems and greater liquidity and cash visibility – automation does so much more than save time (and papercuts!).
To learn the full extent of how our corporate banking platform can help you build real-time, secure data connections between 16,000+ global banks, business applications and payment schemes, schedule a demo with one of our finance and treasury specialists now:
