Would your organization save money by doing more in less time, with greater accuracy? Would having complete, accurate reports available at the push of a button save time and inform decision making? Could reducing errors and identifying suspicious activity minimize financial losses?
Yes, yes and yes!
Increasing productivity, reducing errors, informing decisions and minimizing losses all happen when organizations automate their processes and controls. Automation is the single best way to effectively manage and get visibility to an organization’s finances and operations. Plus, organizations with a higher percentage of automated controls have better safeguards to protect assets and lower the risk of fraud.
Sure, automating is an investment. But the cost of the technology has come way down, while the tools have gotten more powerful. Advanced automation is now accessible even to smaller organizations, and the return on investment is high. Automation, when well-planned and implemented, not only reduces errors and identifies risk. It frees your team to focus on high-value work, keeping them interested and engaged.
Automation will not replace your team. There will always be a need for skilled financial and operations professionals to assess the results of automated reports and any anomalies that are identified. Manual processes and controls greatly enhance the opportunities for fraud and abuse to occur and go undetected, draining money from the organization. Organizations that have a high percentage of automation have a more comprehensive approach that increases confidence that organizational assets are safeguarded.
Automation allows organizations to quickly analyze huge volumes of data from multiple systems, flagging potential fraud patterns as they happen. Instead of a laborious, hands-on process of performing spot checks on random samples of data, software runs continuously in the background, doing the tedious work of scanning everything from emails to purchase orders, looking for patterns and anomalies, and flagging outliers for further investigation.
Organizations that fall into the low end of the range on the percentage of automated processes and controls should take out some time to look at the available software tools that can help crunch much more data, more thoroughly, in less time. Some options are affordable for small businesses and nonprofits. Once automated controls are in place, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without them.