Organisations invest in new technologies, either to new tools or existing tools supported with the latest technology to enable automation of their processes.
Process Automation helps organisations improve task performance by reducing human involvement in repetitive tasks. It involves using technology to accomplish workflows. Improving the productivity of back-office services with process automation is an essential gain for businesses.
Finance professionals find value in the automation of processes as an essential part of their time is spent on preparing reports with predefined frequencies requested by various parties. Financial management and control processes and activities can be automated by tailoring over the shelf software available to finance professionals for specific business needs.
Tools used for reporting processes
MS Excel – This is an industry-standard software for all business professionals.
Finance professionals use formulas, lookups and pivot tables for daily tasks. Spreadsheet programming is the first step to basic automation of these processes. Automation of the reporting processes is achieved by the use of array formulas, Visual Basic and Power Excel (Power Pivot and Power Query).
Power BI – Business intelligence tools present new ways for analysing data, reporting and presenting management information.
Power BI takes basic features of Power Excel and further develops the concept of working with vast amounts of data and relational databases, introduces visualisations, SaaS and AI capabilities. DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) language supports automation.
SQL – This is the language most of the database management systems are built on.
It is easy to learn writing basic queries in SQL and use language with available free software. It is very powerful for summarising a vast amount of data and getting accessible insights. With the improvements in Excel and BI tools, SQL is less used by finance professionals.
Working with these over the shelf applications and tailoring them to the business needs is a competitive advantage for finance professionals and the businesses they are working in.
Reporting processes require precision. All reports start from getting data from systems, preparing it for reporting and then applying some steps to reach the desired report. Preparers of the reports must follow the same steps every time without losing their attention.
A good application of process automation starts with analysing a process from beginning to end, breaking down the process to basic steps and starting from repetitive tasks at each step. Achieving complete automation is not the major goal of automation, but removing the frustration on performing the same steps every time is the best outcome.
Financial software like Excel has a couple of features like array formulas, VBA and power query to automate the repetitive tasks. Depending on the size, amount and complexity of the reports automation can save huge amount of time in terms of man/days.
With a good application of automation, a dedicated person’s 1-month effort to prepare statutory returns can be reduced to one day of preparation and another day of controls.
Making the systems and tools work for you
Instant Finance Partners presents a Data: Analysis, Reporting, Visualisation workshop, a free training program for demonstrating features of both long-standing industry-dominating software and the tools that were developed in the last decade.
The final part of the Data Analysis workshop was dedicated to the automation of repetitive runs of analysis and reporting processes.
A short version of this post was published on LinkedIn.