If you’re asking this question, you’re likely dealing with some of the more common frustrations finance leaders and their teams run into on a daily basis:
- You’re losing time on huge low-value workloads: most of the tasks in the typical finance operations workflow aren’t complex, but they have to be done hundreds or thousands of times a day, and they have to be done right. Even the most diligent AP and AR operators make mistakes when they have to process and reconcile huge volumes of transactions.
- You can’t maintain visibility into your cash flows, liquidity, and overall working capital position: managing high volumes of transactions is difficult enough. If you’re relying on many different banking portals and connectors, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems across different offices or territories, it becomes almost impossible to create a consistent picture of your organization’s financial reality.
- You struggle to manage core operational processes and reporting: Without the right tools, managing reporting on simple KPIs and cyclical obligations like the month-end close a weeks-long process that consumes much of the time you should be spending creating forecasts and scenario plans and optimizing your strategies across core processes like supplier payments and AR collections.
The answer to all this is obvious: invest in finance automation software to handle the tasks your teams currently have to spend most of their time handling themselves.
What tools can I use to automate core finance processes?
Modern finance automation software covers the following core areas:
- Accounts payable (AP) automation: This covers the processes that govern processing and approving outbound transactions to your suppliers, revenue services, and the like. This includes the capture, processing, and approval of supplier invoices, alongside regulatory obligations like anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, and e-invoicing protocol management. In some cases, it can also include aspects of vendor communications and performance management (especially for solutions that incorporate a vendor self-service portal).
- Payments automation: Covers the physical and digital infrastructure your business relies on to ensure that outbound cash arrives where it’s supposed to in a timely and secure fashion. A solid B2B payments management solution has to be configured for the correct payment networks and rails, banking partner portals, regulatory regimes, and routing preferences.
- Accounts receivable (AR) automation: This covers the processes that govern bringing money into the business from your customers and clients, namely credit and risk management, collections, and cash application, along with communication-led processes like customer management and dispute management and resolution.
- Cash and liquidity management: The day-to-day treasury operations that underpin your business’s ability to invest in growth-driving initiatives. These can include functionalities like financial planning and analysis (FP&A) automation (usually dependent on strong connectors with both your ERP system of record and your AR and AP data sources), but also encompasses things like bank connection and account management and a unified view of all your incoming and outgoing working capital. More advanced solutions will also provide the architectural basis for complex multinational treasury operations (like in-house banking, receivables and payments factories, intercompany lending protocols, cash pooling, and FOREX hedging).
How do you choose the right finance automation software for your needs?
The first thing to do is to stop thinking about this as a “software acquisition” question, and start thinking of it as a business process transformation question.
There’s no such thing as the “best” finance process automation software on the market—what’s right for your organization’s needs is heavily dependent on its size, the complexity of your accounting, your specific industry sector and regulatory environment, your existing systems, and the markets in which you do business.
With that in mind, you’ll need to take the following steps before you start looking around vendor websites for their pricing:
1. Map your current finance workflows and tools
Determining where you are now is essential for any change project. Before you can identify what tools might be able to help you, you’ll first need to understand where you’re losing time, and where automations will add value.
For most businesses, AP is an obvious starting point because solid AP processes are a strategic necessity for strong supply chains. But in other cases, you might have no problems paying your vendors, but struggle to keep DSO down when collecting payments from your own customers.
More complex organizations will likely have basic AP and AR processes under tight control in their home market, or within certain core business areas, but struggle with more delicate operations like multi-entity cash management and compliance tracking and reporting for audits.
2. Prioritize your biggest challenges
You can use nature of your process bottlenecks to better understand where you should invest in automation:
- Invoice overload? Invest in AP automation both to expedite the data capture and approvals process, and to prevent both human error and deliberate procurement fraud attacks.
- Drowning in spreadsheets? Look for solutions in the affected teams with strong ERP integrations that automatically handle the importing and sharing of data.
- Poor cash visibility? You’ll need to explore options that consolidate your workflows in a limited number of tools for greater agility.
- Month-end close taking months? Dedicated close-management platforms might be your best starting point, provided your data is clean enough for them to interpret.
- Too many tools?You probably need to consider ERP transformation to create a single system of record for every part of your O2C and P2P value chain.
The biggest red flags to address for operational efficiency in finance are:
- Too many disconnected tools: A common problem for larger enterprises where “spot tools” are bought in to fix specific issues without reference to a wider strategic framework. Rather than helping your long-term efficiency, this is likely to lead to more bottlenecks as your business expands.
- Processes that are more exception than rule: Highly manual processes in complex finance and accounting ecosystems tend to become more about exception handling than following the rules over time. As with disconnected tools, this represents a huge risk to your ability to do business, as bad processes break much faster at scale.
- No real-time data visibility or data integrity: Automated systems are only as good as the data you feed into them (and this goes for AI systems as well). If you can’t keep track of your data or guarantee its accuracy, that’s a huge problem—and one you likely won’t be able to fix without significant cleaning and archiving as part of an overall transformation and change management process.
3. Shortlist vendors for integrations, not features
One of the biggest sources of transformation risk is the implementation process. Implementation risk typically comes from poor integration capacity with your existing systems (or with other new systems you’re onboarding to handle more complex financial challenges).
Any solutions you bring to the table will need, at minimum, to integrate quickly and seamlessly with:
- Your ERP system of record: Regardless of its capabilities, any tool which can’t talk to your organization’s operational backbone isn’t much use to you and should be avoided.
- Your payments and payroll systems: Cash visibility depends on having a clear picture of where and how money is entering and leaving the organization. Without it, you expose yourself to potential future fraud risk.
- Your banking partners’ portals and systems: Likewise, if you can’t see what’s in your accounts, you don’t have much hope of optimizing spend for dates and dynamic discounts, or unlocking sources of idle investment capital.
- Software in your O2C value chain: If you can’t align data with your CRM and sales systems, you won’t be able to spot sources of collections delay or accurately forecast future income.
- Your procurement and supplier management systems: Smart integrations between different parts of the P2P value chain are a key part of the fight to protect your organization from payments fraud attacks—any gaps represent an unnecessary degree of vulnerability.
Your reporting and compliance management systems: All parts of your automation stack need to be able to deliver rock-solid, audit-ready reports in real time as regulators around the world are increasingly demanding instant disclosure and real-time compliance, especially from larger organizations.
4. Prioritize scalability over short-term utility
A tool that’ll only be of use to you for 24 months isn’t a sustainable long-term investment. If you’re onboarding a finance automation solution to help accelerate your growth, you need to make sure it grows with you.
Some solutions are perfect for SMEs and startups with simple accounts, but these tend to strain under high-volume transactions (and many may refuse to work with organizations that grow too large for capacity or liability reasons).
For this reason, it’s often wise to invest in the “next size up” in terms of enterprise software for finance. Think of it as equipping yourself for the revenue band you want, not the revenue band you have.
5. Pay close attention to deployment options
For most finance automation vendors, cloud-native is now the standard. And for many organizations, this is the perfect deployment model: cloud solutions are more scalable, they’re generally more affordable in terms of CAPEX vs OPEX balance and recurring liabilities, and they’re increasingly sold with a solid array of ERP connectors straight out of the virtual box.
But cloud – particularly public cloud – isn’t right for everyone:
- If your business works in a sector where security is paramount, you’ll need the option of private cloud deployment.
- If you require a highly customized or specific set of capabilities, you might still find that on-prem is a better deployment model.
- If you’re dealing with a complex legacy migration, a hybrid model or “side-by-side” deployment of on-prem and cloud solutions might be best.
The right vendor for you will be able to work within the deployment constraints you need to succeed. Be wary of those who try to gainsay your instincts (and your own assessments) on what your organization needs to meet its strategic and tactical goals.
6. Assess AI readiness
Thanks to AI, finance is evolving from manual discipline that leverages rules-based automation to a primarily autonomous discipline based on flexible and predictive systems.
AI already has strong live use cases in both AP automation and AR automation. Serrala customers typically see 70% straight-through invoice processing rates, and higher still with preferred suppliers, with 99% automation in cash application on the AR side.
We’ve seen our AI-powered solutions cut DSO by 10%, automate up to 100% of collections tasks in real time, and reduce bad debt by 10% or more. These results don’t come from futuristic capabilities, but from applying proven principles to specific parts of the collections workflow. You should carefully assess any vendor’s AI capabilities because if they don’t have a coherent roadmap for AI implementation, you risk buying into a solution that will rapidly become outdated.
What does a good finance automation setup look like?
At Serrala, we’ve been helping CFOs and their teams automate finance operations for over 40 years. It’s our job to help you integrate new technologies within your organization in a way that makes sense both for your challenges and their capabilities.
We’ve developed our newly released Serrala Finance Platform with AI-readiness and autonomous finance principles in mind.
A single working capital intelligence hub that provides the foundation to bring AR, AP, payments, and treasury workflows together in a flexible system that adapts to individual organizations’ digital transformation roadmaps while enabling AI integration in every single process.
Most importantly, the Platform is designed to make the kind of data clarity and quality necessary to leverage AI for autonomous processes simpler for organizations to achieve. We leave storage to your ERP—after all, that’s what it’s designed for—and allow every part of the finance department to access it to automate workflows, accelerate decisions, and deliver measurable ROI. And our solutions are all available as standalone cloud and hybrid solutions with integrations for all ERPs, or as fully embedded extensions of existing SAP ECC and S/4HANA environments.
This allows us to provide the integrated architecture to deploy all AI use cases in a way that ensures total and seamless operational efficiency while still providing complete choice and flexibility as to which parts of the offering your organization uses (and pays for) at every stage of your transformation journey.
This means our solutions empower your organization to start with the workflows you need today, then expand as your needs grow and your transformation plans mature.
Ready to leverage smart automation to simplify your finance management process?
If you’re ready to take the first step, check out our full report on the Road to Autonomous Finance and the Serrala Finance Platform here, or get in touch with a Serrala expert today to book a demo.
FAQ
What is finance automation software?
Finance automation software helps businesses streamline repetitive financial tasks such as accounts payable, payments processing, accounts receivable, cash management, reporting, and compliance tracking.
Which finance processes can be automated?
Common areas include AP automation, AR automation, payments automation, cash and liquidity management, month-end close processes, collections, cash application, and financial reporting.
How do I know if my company needs finance automation software?
Signs include heavy reliance on spreadsheets, poor cash visibility, slow month-end close cycles, disconnected systems, high transaction volumes, and manual processes that create delays or errors.
What should I look for when choosing finance automation software?
Focus on integration capabilities, scalability, deployment flexibility, AI-readiness, and compatibility with your ERP, banking systems, payroll platforms, and reporting tools.
Why are integrations more important than features?
Even advanced software can create inefficiencies if it can’t connect seamlessly with your existing finance ecosystem. Strong integrations improve visibility, reduce manual work, and lower implementation risk.
Can finance automation software support business growth?
Yes. Scalable solutions help organizations manage increasing transaction volumes, expand into new markets, improve compliance, and support more complex treasury and reporting operations over time.
How is AI changing finance automation?
AI allows for the development of more autonomous and flexible automated finance operations by improving invoice processing, collections management, cash application, forecasting, and decision-making with predictive and real-time capabilities.
What deployment options are available for finance automation platforms?
Most vendors offer cloud-native solutions, but many also support private cloud, hybrid, or on-premises deployments depending on security, customization, and legacy system requirements.
