Finance Monthly - December 2021

31 Finance Monthly. Bus i ne s s & Economy enabling proactive communication to suppliers, while also helping reduce the likelihood of invoices being paid late, removing the risk of late payment penalty fees. Purchase Orders (POs) POs play a key role in financial control, with many companies insisting on their use for spend above a particular threshold. The creation and approval of POs are commonly a pain point for companies. There can be a disconnect between budget owners and suppliers, resulting in invoices being raised with incorrect or fully utilised PO numbers. Using an automated PO tool that integrates to the core accounting platform streamlines processes so they can be created on the fly or from within forecasts. Additionally, they can auto-match invoices to PO numbers when received, eliminating the risk of being assigned incorrectly and delaying payment to critical suppliers. Group consolidation A number of core accounting software providers don’t include functionality to consolidate at a group level. Finance professionals can get around this by exporting figures for individual companies into spreadsheets and manually making adjustments to consolidate group companies. Alongside the risk of entering data incorrectly and a potential delay to month- end close, this approach requires judgment due to often needing to consider which exchange rates to use and making adjustments based on the accounting standards under which the parent company is prepared. For example, this may include whether to recognise unreleased foreign currency gains/losses in the balance sheet or profit and loss, or revenue recognition treatment. Using core accounting software that has consolidation features, or a third-party consolidation package, will ensure consistent treatment across all group companies and save finance employees from the hassle of exporting and manipulating accounts data. Expense management Managing employee expenses has historically been a chore for finance teams due to having to chase colleagues for their reports at month-end, alongside also needing sign-off from managers for approval. Additionally, the quality of submitted reports is often patchy, with receipts missing and spend being taken to the wrong accounting category. Embracing an automated expense management solution results in more accurate expense reports, allowing for easy upload of supporting receipts, OCR data extraction, and easy imports into accounting software. As CFOs’ roles and responsibilities grow, an increasing amount of pressure is put on the finance team to focus on tasks that help grow businesses – it’s essential more importance is placed on adopting finance automation as part of businesses’ wider digital transformation plans. Embracing automation for all of the above tasks will benefit finance teams and the wider business. Finance team members will be able to use their time to produce up-to- date reports, providing financial and operational insights into company performance to grow sales, optimise KPIs and finetune acquisition channels. of CFOs in the UK are dealing with more manual financial operations than ever before.” “