Guide to Finance and Accounting Automation

Finance and accounting automation is an end-to-end process of integrating fragmented finance SaaS apps to automate critical business processes. Integrating disparate applications vastly reduces manual data entry and siloed data, improves the speed and accuracy of financial reporting, and facilitates strategic planning.

Table of Contents

• Finance and Accounting Automation Overview
• How to Decide if You Need to Automate Finance and Accounting
• A Roadmap to Finance and Accounting Automation
• Benefits of Finance and Accounting Automation
• Why Celigo?

Finance and Accounting Automation Overview

The increase of specialized finance and accounting SaaS apps has created a misalignment between sales and finance teams. Sales and finance personnel work in different systems, and when data doesn’t flow automatically between these tools, finance and accounting teams manually re-enter data.

72% of finance teams spend up to 10 hours per week on accounts payable tasks that could be automated and 4% of manually entered finance data is wrong.

Manual processes increase the risk of inaccurate data across spreadsheets resulting in processing errors, added costs, and inaccurate data.

Integration-driven automation accelerates various accounting processes, reduces overhead costs, and shortens the time it takes to close the books. Automation is intended to supplement finance and accounting personnel. It minimizes manual, repetitive tasks so teams can focus on strategic business initiatives.

Entire processes can be automated, including quote-to-cash, order-to-cash, accounts receivable, accounts payable, procure-to-pay, expense management, financial close, and more.

How to Decide if You Need Finance and Accounting Automation

Are you experiencing any of the below challenges?

1. Multiple enterprise-resource planning (ERP) instances and third-party tools with integration gaps
2. Siloed data and CCR activities
3. Disparate processes and procedures due to mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations
4. Slow, error-prone manual workarounds
5. A lack of visibility and real-time information for management
6. The constant risk of financial-reporting errors

Benefits of Finance and Accounting Automation

There are many benefits to automating financial and accounting business processes, including:

• Eliminates the data silos between sales and finance
• Boosts data visibility for sales and finance
• Allows you to close the books faster
• Speeds up both accounts receivable and accounts payable
• Reduces overhead, saves time and resources
• Minimizes the risk of errors
• Accelerates cash visibility and financial close
• Improve the speed and accuracy of financial reporting
• Improves confidence in compliance
• Maximize the accuracy and timeliness of your expense processes

 

Automate Key Finance and Accounting Processes

Quote to Cash

Improve cash flow by automating billing and order management. Eliminate manual data entry and data silos between CRM, ERP, and CPQ systems and facilitate a bidirectional data flow between departments.

Accounts Receivable

Enable your AR department to work more efficiently by consolidating all critical information, like account statuses and payment histories, all in one place. Replace manual tasks involved with invoicing customers and collecting payments. AR automation provides a business with more accurate data, allowing a company to improve its customer outreach by automatically generating invoices, emailing payment reminders, and providing multiple payment options.

Financial Close

Eliminate manual AP file transfers between your ERP and banks. Automate FTP transfers of vendor payment files from your ERP to banks, and summary files from banks back to your ERP. By automating these types of file transfers, companies can reduce operating costs, strengthen vendor relationships, and improve compliance with internal controls.

Expense Processing

Reimburse employees quickly and automatically while keeping your financial data accurate by syncing employee records with your expense management system.

Accounts Payable

Eliminate manual billing, collections, and invoice processes by integrating AR and AP systems with your ERP. Get paid faster and remove the possibility of sending inaccurate contracts. Automation ensures financial data quality and allows you to close the books in days instead of weeks.

Procure-to-Pay

Reduce costly procurement errors, increase policy compliance, and speed to order, all while improving your financial visibility. Ingesting data from multiple systems provides transactional transparency throughout the procurement process.

Financial Reporting and Analytics 

Get accurate, real-time KPI visibility and financial reporting across sales and finance systems. Ingest financial data into a data warehouse, and eliminate manual data dumps via spreadsheets that can lead to outdated static reports.

Thousands of companies have used Celigo to enable finance, accounting, and enterprise-wide automation.

Thousands of companies have used Celigo to enable Finance and Accounting and enterprise-wide automation. Celigo provides full coverage with a comprehensive library of solutions built to support Finance and Accounting process automation.

With managed, prebuilt solutions, you can leverage AI/machine learning to manage and assist in integrations, including self-healing and error management.

Experts in finance and accounting process automation

With thousands of customers choosing Celigo for their Financial Automation needs, we have the subject matter expertise and are the leader in business process automation. We provide end-to-end coverage with expert guidance and customizable business best practices.

A powerful, scalable platform

The Celigo platform is an enterprise-ready Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) that can handle any complex integrations for any organization regardless of the use case. Integrate all of your applications, automate your Finance and Accounting processes, scale your business, and say goodbye to operational inefficiencies.

Accessible for everyone

An intuitive UI empowers business users to self-serve and manage automations without coding. Easy-to-use monitoring and error management means you don’t have to rely on technical resources to build and manage your integrations.