How to get Real-time Visibility for your Finances

When it comes to business expenses it's important to maintain great levels of real-time visibility, so you can see where your company is spending, and if there are any unnecessary expenses or growth opportunities.

All of these things are vital for the running of a business and are made easier to identify with the use of finance automation software.

This article will define finance automation and delve further into how this software can be used to get real-time visibility into your finances.

What is finance automation?

Finance automation is all about removing some of the workload from the finance team and allowing a software platform to handle some of these duties.

Traditionally, finance teams have used ways of working that have required great manual effort and significant repetition, which becomes inefficient and leads to inaccuracies in financial reporting.

It can also lessen the accounting team's productivity, as they have to focus on more tedious tasks, like chasing after employees for their reimbursement receipts and manually uploading this information.

And with this type of information in various platforms and different formats, there is no unifying structure that is easily accessible to all.

Modern platforms for spend management now offer accounting teams to automate much of the work that was once all carried out manually.

Now these expenses can be accessed from one single platform, which gives tighter control over important business areas, like spend management.

But, what else can this software be incorporated into to obtain real-time visibility for your finances?

Implementing regular forecasting

The use of finance automation software makes it easier to handle forecasting, as regular forecasting uses automated data platforms to create real-time finance reports.

Continuous reports are more accurate than static ones formulated at the start of the year, where data could be significantly outdated.

Regular reports make it easier to compare actual and predicted costs, giving your finance team enough time to adjust budgets and spend allowances accordingly.

Spend data centralization

The only way to carry out efficient forecasting is through gathering expense information so that it's easy for all to view the same data.

Centralizing this information into one cloud-based platform allows your entire finance team to access it from a wide range of locations and this one source equates to more reliable data.

This makes it easier for your accounting team to spot anomalies or important patterns within a company's spend data, allowing them to make wiser financial decisions.

Spend compliance

This is an integral part of company spend, and incorporating this into a business permits employees to make spending decisions, whilst saving vital time from responding to various approval requests.

A risk that could arise is someone deliberately or accidentally breaking your company's specific spend policies, so compliance needs to be incorporated from the get-go.

Types of spend management technology, including finance automation software, inputs spend policies into the system and automates approvals, so the risk of overstepping purchase permissions is lessened.

Achieving great levels of real-time visibility is vital for all businesses and there are certain steps to take to gain the best results.

One of them is utilizing finance automation software to take your business to the next level, improving the productivity of all employees and saving on company spend.