Dimitri Dadiomov is the co-founder and CEO of Modern Treasury.
For most business owners, figuring out what’s happening on their online page is a breeze. Tools like Google Analytics and others offer accurate, real-time counting of visits, clicks, time spent on a page, and more. Similar teams are available for executives who want to keep track of everything from business intelligence knowledge to marketing activities.
But good luck to the manager who needs to have an accurate and up-to-date breakdown of key monetary indicators, such as how many coins the company holds. Overall, this is a better estimate. Books want to be reconciled. It is necessary to run different software systems and add up sums of coins. Few things are automated, requiring too much manual work, which can introduce errors.
These types of disorders worsen with scale. There are about 4,000 monetary establishments in the United States, and many of them work with other software systems. From my interactions with customers and prospects, I know that a large company could send or receive invoices through banks and use financial and accounting systems. This creates more boxes to reconcile knowledge so that the finance team can begin to perceive what’s going on.
All of this paves the way for business-to-business invoice management. A finance team that has a single, real-time view of a company’s finances and cash movement is a self-sustaining team. An organization that operates from the same up-to-date monetary snapshot is one that fosters greater collaboration, maximizes efficiency, and motivates leaders, managers, and investors to think more in monetary terms.
For most companies, the view of their own finances is opaque. On average, nearly a fraction of U. S. companies with 500 to 5000 workers use five or more systems to handle payment transactions, according to the results of a 2022 survey we conducted with Harris Poll. to be carried out among more than three hundred monetary decision-makers. Four out of ten people said payment transactions were still manual, and 88% reported disruptions with payment systems. Of those, 30% said they don’t have a real-time review of the money. balance sheets. At most, all respondents (96%) reported negative effects on their business, adding lost time for workers (41%) and a greater monetary threat (39%).
This is not just a challenge in the United States. A Forrester Consulting survey (commissioned through Corcentric) of 663 U. S. monetary decision-makers found the most important survey of the world’s monetary decision-makers. A survey of the U. S. , U. K. , and France found similar trends: 51% experienced “a lack of digitization of payments, a lack of automation (49%), manual payment processes (46%), and accounts receivable and accounts payable processes disconnected (44%). “
All around us, virtual transformation is reshaping businesses and organizations, large and small. Cloud-based programs offer useful information about a company, whether it’s for visitor services representatives, outbound salespeople, marketing staff, or other must-have functions. But in finance, most accountants still show up with spreadsheets to reconcile the books and make sense of it all.
Automating payment transactions can offer benefits and reduce disruption for many organizations. By combining other systems and knowledge flows and harmonizing, structuring and displaying them in a single dashboard, companies can provide those who want to access monetary data with clear and real information. -Temporal view of what is happening in the business.
Here are five questions to ask when assessing whether you need to automate payment operations.
1. Would money optimization allow you to offer a better visitor experience, make faster decisions, or enable any other additive business approach?If you don’t and you’re comfortable reconciling your finances on a weekly or monthly basis, automation may not be a must-have for you right now.
2. Does your finance team have time to focus on strategic issues?Would it help your company if that were the case?By strategic, I mean everything that goes beyond the day-to-day control of incoming and outgoing payments.
3. How does your finance team spot mistakes after the fact?If not, everything works. But if errors aren’t unusual and there are a lot of manual processes going on, automation can come in handy.
4. Do company leaders have confidence that they’re making financial decisions based on accurate, up-to-the-moment financial data? Would having that kind of data help your team make better decisions?
5. How soon will your payment needs increase? If you’re running a startup, automation probably isn’t necessary when you’re very small, but if you’re making plans for immediate growth, you may need to get the infrastructure. into position sooner rather than later.
Achieving a simpler view of finance is not a simple task for companies. Billions of banknotes are sent to the U. S. U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention every month. Many of those transactions are specific — it’s just a dollar amount with little to no context. Cash movement can be an accounting nightmare.
Over time, all invoices will start and end with the software. Payments and other monetary transactions will be incorporated into products and facilities and automated. This will help those companies have a competitive advantage because, as we’ve noticed in the customer space, more and more frictionless bills are expected.
In the meantime, companies will have to deal with their own money groups and departments and decide what’s best for them in terms of payment operations. The market offers much more equipment and technologies than ever before. When companies learn about how much they perceive their finances in real time, how accurate their processes are, and how those elements make decisions, leaders can make more informed decisions about their future.
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