Step-by-step guide to streamline your financial workflow process

What is a financial workflow process?

A financial workflow process is the organized sequence of steps followed to handle financial tasks within a business. Think of common tasks like expense reimbursements or invoice payments. A financial workflow would define the steps needed, like submitting receipts, getting approvals, and issuing payments. It's like a roadmap for easily managing money.

Common financial workflow processes

Financial workflows are essential for businesses to maintain financial health, comply with regulations, and make smart decisions to support the overall goals of an organization. Here are some of the primary components along with commonly used processes within each:

• Financial reporting: Involves the preparation and presentation of financial information to stakeholders, including investors, regulators, and internal management. Common processes include recording transactions and preparing financial statements.
• Tax preparation: Managing taxes is crucial for any organization. Processes in tax preparation may include tax planning, filing returns, and compliance.
• Financial forecasting: Forecasting includes predicting future financial performance based on historical data and market trends. Processes may involve budgeting, revenue projections, and expense forecasts.
• Expense management: It’s important to control and monitor expenses to optimize resource utilization. Processes may include expense tracking, invoice approval workflows, and cost-reduction strategies.

Why is financial workflow management important?

Overall, financial workflow management plays an important part in enhancing organizational performance, driving operational excellence, and supporting strategic objectives. By embracing automation, standardization, and optimization — organizations can unlock significant benefits in terms of productivity, accuracy, efficiency, and compliance in their financial management processes.

What are the benefits of streamlining financial workflows?

Defined financial workflows offer several benefits to organizations, including:

• Increased productivity: Clear steps and roles mean less confusion and delays. Financial tasks get finished quicker, allowing employees to focus on more strategic work.
• Enhanced accuracy: No more human errors! Defined workflows mean more accurate financial information to make well-informed decisions.
• Improved efficiency: Automating workflows frees up time and lets teams focus on important things that grow the business.
• Better compliance: Clear steps help ensure regulatory compliance. This helps avoid practices that put the company at risk and protect against potential fines and lawsuits.
• Faster decision making: Quicker workflows and up-to-date financial data means decisions can be made faster and more accurately. This helps businesses adapt to changing markets.
• Cost savings: Less busywork, fewer errors, and better use of resources leads to short- and long-term cost savings.

Related Read:Simple steps, big improvements: improving service delivery by streamlining your accounting workflows

What are common challenges of financial workflow management?

While financial workflows offer plenty of benefits, there are also plenty of challenges, including:

• Making systems work together: It can be tough to connect different accounting, invoicing, and payroll programs. Successful technology integrations can be costly and may require investment in new solutions.
• Fitting unique business needs: Pre-made workflow programs might not work perfectly for every business. It's essential to find a balance between customizing solutions to meet business needs and maintaining standardization.
• Keeping data safe: Financial workflows handle important and sensitive information, so top-notch security is essential.
• Teaching employees new tricks: During implementation, employees need training and dedicated resources on using new workflows and technology. This takes time and money.
• Working with a tight budget: Budget limitations and competing priorities can make it hard to improve workflows. New technology, training, and support all cost money.

How to streamline financial workflow processes

Streamlining financial workflow processes involves optimizing and automating tasks to improve efficiency, accuracy, and compliance. Whether you’re a financial advisor or a finance team working with leadership, this process requires close collaboration to ensure implementation works across the organization.

Let’s dive into a step-by-step guide on how businesses can effectively streamline financial workflows.

Related Read:How to quickly find weak points in your workflow

11-step guide to streamlining financial workflows

By following these steps, organizations can streamline their workflows for financial advisors, leading to improved efficiency, accuracy, compliance, and overall financial performance.

• Assess current processes: Start by mapping out current financial processes to define the order of tasks, roles and responsibilities, and who needs access to information. This will help you identify areas of inefficiency and opportunities for improvements.
• Set clear goals: Now that you have audited your current processes, it’s time to set goals. Start by asking yourself what you hope to achieve by streamlining workflows (e.g., improve efficiency, minimize errors, meet compliance, etc.). Having clear goals will set you on a better path to success.

• Standardize and document procedures: Now that you have clearly defined goals, it’s time to set processes for key financial tasks like budgeting, invoicing, managing expenses, and generating reports. Having well-documented steps for each process will improve consistency, minimize confusion, and empower better workflows.

• Find areas for automation: With process steps outlined, you can identify tasks that can be automated with technology. This can include processing invoices, approving expenses, calculating payroll, and generating financial reports. Automating tasks reduces errors and speeds up processes.

• Invest in technology: Now that you’ve identified areas for improvement, you can invest in tools to automate repetitive tasks, expedite data entry, and give a real-time view of your financial picture. Choose tools that work well with existing systems and that can scale as your business grows.

• Put all financial data in one place: Prior to setting up your workflows, consolidate financial data from different sources into one central system. This makes leveraging data more accurate, easier to see, and simpler to access for analysis and reporting purposes.

• Set up approval workflows: With the right technology and data sources, you can create clear approval processes for financial transactions and requests. This ensures everyone follows internal guidelines and policies. Use workflow automation software to route requests to the right people for review and approval.

• Follow the rules: It’s key to build checks and controls into financial workflows to ensure compliance with regulations, internal policies, and industry standards. You can set up alerts and notifications to warn of potential compliance issues or if something deviates from established procedures.

• Train the team: Provide your staff with comprehensive training and ongoing support for the new processes, tools, and technologies you're introducing. Ensure they understand their roles and responsibilities within each process.

• Track progress: From the beginning, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of your new workflows. These could include processing time, error rates, compliance levels, and cost savings. Regularly monitor and analyze these metrics to identify areas for further optimization and improvement.

• Keep improving: As you go, continuously review and refine your workflows based on feedback, performance data, and evolving business needs. Gather input from key stakeholders and seek opportunities to incorporate new technologies and best practices to further optimize processes.

Software solutions to enhance the financial workflow process

There are many types of tech-based solutions available to improve financial workflows across different stages of financial management. These include:

• Accounting software: Automates bookkeeping, invoicing, and reporting. It tracks expenses and connects directly to banks for easier record keeping.
• Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) software: Allows businesses to analyze different scenarios to make informed decisions around financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
• Expense management tools: Scans receipts, categorizes expenses, and automatically uploads information to help employees easily track and submit expenses.
• Financial reporting and analytics tools: Transforms financial data into easy-to-understand charts and graphs, accessible via custom dashboards that offer both at-a-glance and in-depth data analysis.
• Tax management software: Simplifies tax preparation and filing by automating calculations, generating forms, and providing guidance on tax breaks and regulations.
• Workflow automation platforms:Empowers businesses to save time and minimize errors while building automated workflows for financial processes like invoicing and expense reimbursements.
• Document management systems: Stores and organizes important financial documents like invoices and contracts into an intuitive interface that makes it easy to find, send, store, and secure documents.
• Collaboration tools: Enables collaboration across departments, allowing teams to share files, chat, and hold video meetings with one another.

Improve financial workflows with automation

Financial advisors and teams do a lot and automation can make a big difference. Automating financial workflows saves time, money, and resources by streamlining otherwise cumbersome processes. This frees up teams to focus on what's most important: helping their clients. By streamlining workflows with automation, financial advisors can focus more time on business priorities and client retention to succeed in a competitive market.

Check outthis page to learn how ShareFile is empowering the financial industry to improve workflows with purpose-built automation technology.