Why your finance team needs automating

Never known for their rock and roll style of life, finance (particularly accountants), are stereotypically a little dull. Why? Well, you have to be of a certain mindset to want to trawl numbers in a spreadsheet and enjoy it. You have to have a structured mindset to enjoy anything in a spreadsheet - all those columns and rows, endless, the stuff of nightmares for most people.

The reason I know that accountants are supposed to be dull people (dull - but well-paid people) is due to stereotypes I have seen in the movies (see Look Who's Talking and Mask). The we non-finance people do not know our EBITDA from our FICO. I mean what the FICO is it anyway? Even financial administrators do not know what any of this means and they work alongside accountants all the time. Typically accountants work while others party. Long hours constantly trying to reconcile accounts.

Accountants are great at their job, the stereotypical accountant no longer exists because their job, in the right company, has also been simplified with tech, automation, and integration. All they want is the same efficiency from their team members, because that is what they are, well-oiled, efficient machines. This is where automating the finance team's processes comes in. Finance teams love numbers, so...

‍

Contracts by numbers.

Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers claim a business can save up to 2% of their annual costs by utilizing contract management. How about Goldman Sachs suggesting that by automating contract management, it can:

‍

- Accelerate negotiation cycles by 50%

- Reduce erroneous payments by 75 to 90%

- Cut operating and processing costs related to to contract management by 10-30%

‍

And what about this by CottrillResearch, CLOC, and ACC.

‍

- 46 cents out of every $1 spent on legal services goes on external costs

- 37% of companies spent more than $750k on legal technology in 2018

- $1M is the average legal technology spend for mid-size companies with in-house engineering resources in 2018

‍

What is automation for finance?

Make your life easy, automate it. Having central spaces for documents makes things so much easier. Gone are the days where invoices are printed and sat on a desk getting lost beneath other invoices also getting lost. Not only this but filing away paid and executed invoices is also unnecessary. Does your business have a room dedicated to archived invoices saved for a rainy day... that never comes. Online storage is so much easier.

How about just having a solution to creating invoices and streamlining that process? Finance teams can use the exact same tech stack as the rest of the business. For example, take Contractbook > CRM > Quickbooks. The extraction of data from the CRM into a contract via the sales team then becomes a triggered invoice ready for the finance teams to manage post signature. Renewals, renegotiations. Everyone is on top of the game.

Here is what companies achieved after switching to CLM, based on this:

‍

• 1% larger average deal size
• 2.5% higher annual customer renewal rate
• 12% higher proposal volume
• 20% higher lead conversion rate
• 24% shorter sales cycles
  
  

Why is it important?

Automation means there is one source of truth, as mentioned above, everyone uses an all-in-one solution like Contractbook and hooks it up with all of the existing apps. Integration means that there is transparency right the way through the company, each stage of the process is managed.

What about the repetitive nature of the finance department. As mentioned above, accountants are a rare breed, they thrive on repetitive tasks, maybe they are the only humans that are already automated, like a number-crunching cyborg. We digress. Repetitive tasks anywhere mean boredom, stagnated processes, and hindered performance. That all equates to errors and missed opportunities and these in a legal sense mean a high level of risk attached to contracts.

By automating your processes in the finance teams, and aligning them with other areas of the business it is possible to be fully in sync right the way through your organization. The pain of miscommunication is taken away, make sure the right people get the right information. Eliminate manual errors by automating your entire recurring billing and invoicing operations from lead to ledger. Handle complex recurring billing scenarios as you scale. Remove developer dependencies by gaining complete control over your billing and invoicing logic and keep all your tools in synch with streamlined contract automation.