This is a guest post by Lasse Kalkar, CEO of LiveFlow
As the pandemic accelerated the rise of technology by another decade in just one year, it is no surprise that finance automation and efficiency should also follow. Yet, in today’s world of 2021, tons of finance teams across the globe are still buried in manual, slow, and non-efficient processes to run their finances.
But what exactly does it mean to work slow and manually? Let’s take a look at a few examples:
- You spend 2-4 hours a week completing the same task of manual data entry without having automating it
- You spend 1 hour per week reviewing and approving documents that you already have seen
- You spend 2 hours per week finding and matching receipts to the correct transactions
- You spend 3 hours per week downloading data from one platform and uploading it to another
Oftentimes data in accounting/revenue/CRM platforms is designed to fit a particular company profile without being customised and tailored to your requirements. For instance your CRM might not tell you whether your revenue is recognised and you will be prone to make a mistake in your future forecasts.
On another side of things, you might want the entire team to be aware of your P&L to build trust and make sure your employees understand where your company stands financially and where it is heading to. You probably want the team to see the big picture and make their decisions about their next spend request based on the most recent financial data of their department. However, to share the actuals via an accounting platform or attached files by email might be tricky given that it would require a lot of time and effort from all stakeholders.
Sounds familiar? If you nodded yes to either of these examples, you are probably still not automated as much as you could – and you might be lagging behind.
So why is it so wrong to have a few manual processes here and there? Well, because if you want to build a thriving company in 2021, then you will face more competition and challenges than ever before. It has become significantly easier to start a business, more entrepreneurs are now able to compete globally, not just locally, and it’s getting simpler to get access to funding. To win, it’s crucial that your systems and processes are efficient, automated, and smart.
To add to that, automating routine tasks means that you can spend more time on strategic and value-adding tasks, such as doing more marketing, finding more customers, servicing your existing customers, building the product, and many more. Those are the things that will actually bring you dollars in the bank while managing receipts will not. It’s just another part of running your machine. So how can you start to automate some of these heavy finance-related manual tasks? Here are a few ways that LiveFlow can help you with:
- Automating month-end reporting: Instead of you clicking through hundreds of rows of data in spreadsheets, with LiveFlow, you can connect real-time data to your budgets, so you never have to manually import/export your actuals by the end of the month.
- Getting everything in one place: Where before you were clicking around all your various financial platforms, logging into several bank accounts, downloading data from Stripe and so on, you can now integrate all your existing financial stack and get everything in one place in seconds.
With Seedrs offer, you can now get 20% off LiveFlow for 6 months. Sign up here.
