5 benefits of automation for businesses - BILL

In the dynamic world of business, some may not fully understand all the benefits of automation. Automation is often associated with growth because it promotes greater efficiency and enables employees to maximize their time. However, the advantages of this technology go even further.

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By tackling repetitive and mundane tasks and allowing you and your team to focus on what truly matters, automation breathes life into innovation, strategic thinking, and your ability to scale. Let's dive deeper into what automation is and its most significant advantages for businesses.

What is automation in business?

Business automation involves technology to streamline tasks and processes to enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and cut costs. It encompasses automating tasks like data entry, customer relationship management, marketing, supply chain management, and financial processes. 

Ultimately, automation supports your business or firm's capacity to scale. By simplifying your financial operations, you'll be better prepared to handle more complexity and a greater volume of invoices, often without adding headcount. 

Why is automation in business important?

Beyond scaling, automation can help you reduce human error and enhance data accuracy. By automating repetitive tasks like invoicing and expense management, you can save time and resources, and make more informed decisions with real-time visibility into financial data. And with built-in audit trails and other features, you can maintain better regulatory compliance and mitigate risks.

By leveraging automation, businesses can reduce manual errors, improve accuracy, increase efficiency, and free up valuable time for accountants and financial professionals to focus on more strategic and analytical aspects of their roles.

1. Streamline financial operations 

One of the most immediate benefits of automation is streamlined financial operations. Here's what you can expect:

Improve efficiency and enjoy increased productivity

Automation empowers you to standardize business processes—internal and external. This allows you to develop and adhere to best practices for handling essential operations. For instance, accounts payable automation equips you to automate bill review and promptly pay vendors—all while reducing the administrative burden on your employees.

Reduce manual errors and bottlenecks

Consider the impact of a simple data entry error, whether entering the wrong number or recording the same transaction twice. For example, something as simple as a finger slip can create an amount due of $14,600 instead of $1,460. You may have to deal with delays or revenue loss when locating and correcting these errors, which can create stress during tax season.

It could still be easy to wave off these errors and chalk them up to the cost of doing business, but this would be a mistake. According to Data Science Central, small businesses lose over $600 billion each year due to human error.

The best automation software can dramatically reduce these errors for businesses by populating data from relevant documents to produce accurate, timely invoices. For example, BILL's Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) uses machine learning to extract invoice and vendor information from documents up to 50 pages in your Inbox or those you attach to a bill.

Some tools even integrate with your financial software to keep your books up-to-date and accurate, virtually eliminating the chances of human ‌error. For example, BILL's integrations enable automatic or on-demand sync with leading ERPs.

Save time and cut costs

Consider the time you're currently investing in repetitive tasks, such as those required in accounts payable and receivable. If you have employees, they may be devoting a significant amount of time to performing repetitive manual tasks.

Automated processes allow you to spend more time on tasks that produce meaningful business results. For instance, accounts payable automation drastically reduces the time you'd have to manage bills manually. You can then reallocate this time toward revenue-generating activities that drive your business forward. 

2. Enhance accuracy and compliance 

How confident are you in the accuracy of your current business processes? That's an important question, as it also touches on compliance issues that could impact you. However, automation improves your accuracy and ability to stay current with evolving business regulations. 

Stay compliant, facilitate audits, and avoid fraudulent activity

One of the main ways financial automation software protects your business is by using internal controls to assign specific roles and permissions to different users and set a clear separation of duties. 

For example, one person enters financial transactions, another approves them, and a third initiates payment. This separation minimizes the risk of unauthorized actions, enhancing the integrity of financial operations. You can also use a view-only role to enable auditors and other authorized users to view your information without being able to change it. 

Financial automation software can also help create audit trails documenting each action, including who performed it, when it occurred, what changes were made, and payment information. These improve transparency and accountability while making it easier for internal or external auditors to track transactions and verify compliance with regulations and internal policies.

Finally, real-time monitoring of transactions and processes enables you to observe activities as they happen, so you can quickly identify issues and rectify them before they escalate. 

For example, BILL Divvy Cards powered by Visa* can be deactivated quickly if suspicious activity is detected and you can easily use multiple virtual cards to add layers of security. And since cards will only work if they've been sent approved funds, you can also prevent unauthorized purchases from happening in the first place and prevent access to funds in other budgets. 

*The BILL Divvy Card is issued by Cross River Bank, member FDIC, and is not a deposit product.

3.Increase client satisfaction 

Automation isn't just good for your business; it also enhances client experience. Standardizing your processes and service offerings can remove friction and build your reputation.

Provide faster response times 

Automated technology can make your clients' lives easier and keep them informed. You can use automated tools to provide real-time data, total transparency, and 24/7 access through a mobile app. As a result, your clients will always be informed regarding how much they're spending or where a bill is in the payment process.

This level of speed and detail can help your business solidify relationships with existing clientele. But it can also help you secure more bids from future clients who value this level of transparency and rapid feedback.

Improve service quality

Automation allows you to nurture these relationships by leveraging the right tools and satisfying the real-world needs of small to midsize businesses.

In a recent survey, BILL discovered that nearly three out of four (72%) small to midsize businesses are looking for a proactive approach to expense management. You can expand your services to meet this rising demand by leaning on automation for your core processes. 

In other words, automated tools allow you to expand your services "menu," whereas relying solely on manual processes for services like accounts payable or spend and expense management ties up your resources. Pivoting to an automated solution creates new opportunities to meet clients' business challenges and diversify your revenue streams.

4. Empower your employees 

According to the BILL State of Finance Automation report, more and more businesses see automation playing a pivotal role in empowering teams. Automation can help you develop strategies to attract and retain top talent and keep workers engaged.

Focus on higher-value work

Automation saves valuable time that you can spend on higher-value tasks. As it turns out, this can have a trickle-up effect on your entire workforce. Help workers feel more engaged in their work and better understand the company's larger mission—rather than getting caught up in the minute details. After all, your time is better spent on things like customer service, not data entry. 

For example, there's currently a significant talent shortage of accountants and other financial professionals. In light of this, many lack the talent to get work done and also be positioned to scale. Automation software helps by reducing tedious tasks and enables teams to do more with fewer resources.

Foster skill development and job satisfaction

Not every organization can afford to implement entire upskilling or job development initiatives, but leveraging business automation to introduce these possibilities can boost employee engagement and reduce attrition. Employees may be more engaged if they expect to improve their skills by working with your company.

5. Improve scalability and adaptability 

Finally, automated systems allow you to make the most of what you have, helping you develop a manageable strategy for growth.

Increased workload without adding resources

Think of the time you can save with an integrated financial automation platform. You can then reinvest this time by expanding your services. You can also use this time to take on new clients without overtaxing your current workforce.

Either way, you're more equipped to complete more work without significantly changing your technology stack or employee headcount. A small investment in automated business tools can pay dividends in expanding your bandwidth.

What can automation do for your business?

So, what can automation do for your company? Quite a bit. BILL's financial business automation solution can improve the accuracy and efficiency of your core processes and give you the flexibility to adapt to changing client demands.

With rapid technological advancement, the market has become more competitive than ever. As a result, it’s vital that your business invests in cutting-edge technology to improve productivity and efficiency. Any company looking to optimize the customer experience while increasing profits should look to automation for help.

Want more information on Automation Components? Feel free to contact us.

Business process automation allows you to focus on complex tasks while leaving time-consuming, repetitive work to technology. Automation software helps to streamline workflows, reduce costs, maximize efficiency, and increase profit. With automation, you can develop data-driven approaches to your unique process needs.

Using solutions like workflow automation can benefit your organization helps you source the best tools for exceeding your goals and developing the edge you need to outcompete the competition.

What Is Workflow Automation in Business?

Business automation workflow (BAW) Workflow automation involves using technology to design, execute, and manage a sequence of tasks or processes within a business, reducing manual intervention and increasing efficiency. Many workers perform repetitive activities and tasks — this takes lots of time and resources, slowing down productivity and wasting resources and employees that could be better used elsewhere.

Automating business processes involves designing, executing, and monitoring workflows through software. This solution allows you to improve workplace efficiency and reduce manual intervention, which is otherwise much slower. Specialized software allows you to streamline and automate these repetitive tasks for increased productivity and cost-effectiveness.

The software’s accuracy and rapid processing help cut task times and minimize errors. Actions like document routing, notifications, approvals, and data entry can all be improved through automation. Selecting tasks for automation enables you to use employees more effectively, engaging them with complex tasks that can’t be done with automation and maximizing workplace productivity.

Top Reasons for Automation

There are many benefits of automation, and businesses looking to optimize their processes and create a more efficient, productive workflow should consider investing in automation software. With enhanced control and reduced bottlenecks through software, you’ll save time and revenue while surpassing customer expectations.

Letting technology take care of your less-intensive tasks puts your best creative focus on complex processes, helping you develop more sophisticated solutions to answer your target market’s needs. Here are the benefits of investing in business automation:

1. Increase Productivity

Letting software handle repetitive tasks can improve process productivity. Automation software streamlines your business processes, completing tasks more efficiently and managing them for your employees. Employees who no longer need to take time to make schedules, send notifications, and work on document management can focus on more critical, complex tasks.

The software can also perform many tasks at once. While humans need to complete one task at a time to ensure accuracy, computers can receive and complete more rote tasks in less time than one employee. With work getting done faster and more accurately, your productivity increases.

Overall, every workflow process will see better, faster completion for optimized business productivity.

2. Improve Efficiency

Efficiency and productivity go hand-in-hand. The more efficient your processes, the more productive your business is. Automation helps streamline operations, reduce bottlenecks, and cut errors. By minimizing these hang-ups, automation makes your business more efficient.

Because software uses minimal resources, your spending also becomes more efficient, letting you allocate resources to other processes that need more focus. With resources going where needed, software finishing many repetitive jobs, and employees working on complex tasks, your entire operation will run more efficiently than ever.

3. Prevent Errors

While every company focuses on hiring skilled employees, humans do make mistakes. Working on repetitive, unengaging tasks can lead to absent-mindedness and multi-tasking, increasing the chance of error. The software doesn’t get distracted like employees, so it always provides the same accuracy to every new task. Automating workflow processes helps reduce human error, where precision is essential.

Additionally, the software’s accuracy helps every aspect of your business processes. With better accuracy from automated tasks, employees farther along in the process have a more reliable foundation to work off of. They’ll have better response times and more accurate results if they have software-accurate data to work from.

All components of your business processes will see improved accuracy when you use automation.

4. Reduce Costs

Workflow processes don’t directly generate revenue for your organization — they support other processes that directly generate revenue. Using employees to complete these processes manually consumes labor and costs that software doesn’t have. Switching to automated tasks cuts operational costs for employing people for these tasks and covers the time they take to complete.

With software handling repetitive tasks, you’ll save on labor costs while being able to focus on areas that directly generate profit for your business. Reducing labor and time expenses while focusing your freed-up resources on increasing profits will help cut non-essential costs.

5. Emphasize Standardization

While creativity and problem-solving are valuable skills for employees to have, they can lead to inefficiency in some areas. Mundane, rule-based tasks might be completed differently by different employees, leading to bottlenecks and wasted time. Automation allows you to implement the most efficient process for completing and standardizing a task — the computer will complete everything as directed without consuming excess time.

With consistency comes higher quality control and better results. You’ll improve operation efficiency, consistency, and transparency with automation standardization.

6. Promote Accountability

Software automation enables you to record every step of your business processes. For increased transparency and accountability, the computer can tell you who did what and when.

With all steps of your processes tracked, you can spot problem points and improve data security. If you need to access these records for audits, you can show all the relevant information. This clarity helps keep everyone accountable and allows you to spot problems where they occur instead of relying on guesswork.

7. Increase Scalability

As your business grows, manual processes become less scalable. The more manual data entry you need to perform, the longer these processes will take. Hiring new employees to take on the workload adds time and costs through recruiting, training, and employing. Working with a new client load can overwhelm a manual company and reduce productivity while increasing costs.

With automation, you can quickly scale your software to meet new workloads. Automation software is much simpler to train for greater workloads and multitasking without cutting into your bottom line or limited time.

8. Boost Employee Morale

Working on repetitive, mundane tasks drains employee motivation and prevents them from exercising their skills. Having employees complete more rewarding work helps them feel more invested and in control of their work. With your employees actively invested in their work and brainstorming creative strategies, they’ll be happier, more productive, and more likely to continue working for you.

9. Enhanced Customer Experience

Customers will prefer your business to other organizations if you can deliver the highest quality, cost-efficiency, and speed. The more attentive you are to customers, the more likely they are to return.

With automation, you can rapidly handle customer questions, streamline deliveries, and adjust to their needs. Data from automation can increase your service personalization, making customers feel seen. You’ll draw more customers in with better consistency, service, and response times than the competition.

What Business Workflow Processes Can You Automate?

Workflow software is best used for rule-based tasks — processes that are repetitive, need to be error-free, and can be more efficient all benefit from automation. Partial and complete automation enables you to allocate resources better and maximize your process productivity. Many digital tasks work well with automation, including:

• Creating staff schedules
• Inputting new client information
• Employee onboarding
• Document routing
• Expense reporting
• Data entry and deletion
• Checking sanctioned individuals and politically exposed persons
• Customer support
• Invoice processing

Workflow automation is endlessly customizable — you can use software to automate dozens of tasks. The more you can automate, the better your businesses can meet your customer base’s speed, accuracy, and reliability requirements. More employees working on complex tasks means better solutions to evolving problems and improved attention to the most critical aspects of your niche.

Why Automate?

Investing in workflow automation enables businesses to improve customer experiences, optimize resource allocation, and minimize costs. Employing workflow automation software lets employees work on higher-value tasks, empowering them to excel in their roles instead of working in repetitive processes. With the accuracy and efficiency of automation, your business can develop rapid response times to industry changes, optimizing efficiency and giving you an edge over the competition.

What Businesses and Departments Benefit From Automation?

Businesses in all industries can benefit from automation. Any organization looking to streamline repetitive data or rule-based processes can integrate automation into their workflow. Workflow automation software helps take time-consuming, dull tasks off your hands so you can focus on what’s important. If you’re looking to minimize response times, promote communication, improve the customer experience, reduce mistakes, and increase productivity, automation can benefit you.

These groups are just a few examples of areas that can benefit from workplace automation software:

• Customer support: Automation can help with repetitive tasks like ticket submission and processing while categorizing and streamlining customer requests. Support employees can more quickly connect with and resolve customer needs when automation handles request management. With more time to interact with customers, employees can develop more personalized connections and solutions for increased customer satisfaction.
• Sales: Software can automate proposal and quote approval, generate task lists, and connect employees to leads. Automating these tasks makes the sales process faster and more efficient. When software performs tasks, you can complete more in a shorter period, allowing your salespeople to focus on maximizing productivity.
• Finance: Finance sectors need to have accurate, transparent information. Automating account approvals, data entry, and employee requests reduces mistakes and increases compliance standards. The software will perform data entry more accurately, catching holes or process violations before they become an issue.
• Human resources: HR needs employees to focus on handling challenging company and employee needs. More complex HR tasks require their entire focus to ensure compliance and appropriate handling. Automated vacation approvals, on- and off-boarding, and benefits changes allow HR to deal with these complex processes fully without focusing on mundane work.
• Project management: Automation is ideal for project management. Its focus on efficiency, cost reduction, and communication makes automation excellent for data entry, error reduction, and cost-cutting. Additionally, automation makes scaling simple for all project management jobs.
• Health care: Medical providers can employ automation for dozens of tasks. Employee scheduling, transferring patient records, and patient admission and discharge are all easily automated. With these tasks handled by software, health care providers can deliver above-and-beyond service to their clients. 
• Operations management: Automate logistics, track operational processes, and display operational statuses conveniently with workflow software. Investing in automation software for your critical processes allows you to manage them with minimal error and cost.

Salient Process Digital Business Automation

If you’re looking to invest in workflow automation solutions, Salient Process is here to help you exceed your business goals. As an industry leader in Digital Business Automation, we have the expertise to provide custom solutions for all your automation needs. We offer specialized custom solutions in the following areas:

• Business automation workflow
• Process mapping and mining
• Robotic process automation
• Chatbots and conversational artificial intelligence
• AI and machine learning

Our Digital Business Automation capabilities are designed to give you business-driven strategies for success. With expert Digital Business Automation tools and years of experience, Salient Process delivers integral, effective solutions for your organization. Working with our experienced team enables you to improve efficiency and focus on priority tasks.

Choose Salient Process for Your Automated Business Needs

Workflow automation can improve workplace efficiency and productivity for all your business processes. Reducing repetitive workflow for your employees encourages them to produce better results for your organization. With happier employees, reduced costs, and increased efficiency, you’ll transform your business processes and hit higher goals. 

You can count on Salient Process to provide you with unmatched software quality and custom solutions every time. From initial setup to ongoing evaluation, our Digital Business Automation capabilities transform your business processes into effective, streamlined operations. Invest in our high-quality technology to enjoy optimized productivity and tangible results.

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