As digital transformation continues to change the business landscape, it is proven that advanced technologies will make significant changes to the way we live and work over the next decades.
One of the digital trends taking a leap in the market landscape is artificial intelligence and machine learning. The backbone of the enterprise: finance team is leveraging AI to drive real-time insights, make informed decisions and to drive efficiency across the enterprise. Therefore, technology will make a significant impact on day-to-day activities – right from automating payments to risk management.
Here are a few areas where artificial intelligence and machine learning can increase productivity, simplify procedures and improve the decision-making process:
Invoice Payments
When you have thousands of customers, your accounts receivable department end-up paying incorrect amounts or mismatch invoice numbers with payments. To clear invoices, the employee has to manually match invoices and payment amounts. In addition, AP team has to wait longer periods of time for approvals and chase down people to get their work done.
Intelligent solutions could automatically suggest invoices that match with the paid amount based on the threshold set and automatically clear the payments or generate invoices.
Audit Expense Claims
Another task that could benefit from intelligent automation is expense claim auditing. Finance team must ensure receipts are genuine and match claimed amounts with the enforced policies. Although the claiming process can be simplified through automated expense report solution, the auditing is still manual.
What if AI and machine learning could simplify the process, audit all the claims and send only the questionable claims to a manager for approval? Intelligent automation could read receipts, ensure the receipts are authentic and match them against the policy.
Analyzing Analytics
What was the revenue last quarter? What is our growth over the last five years? These are the most common questions almost every business owner asks.
Like stock quotes and forecasts, what if you are able to predict your business revenue and access the data instantly? What if a finance team could be able to speak to your business systems the way we are doing with Siri. Well, artificial intelligence can make this possible and allow you to analyze the data and predict analytics for the future.
Automating Approval Workflows
Approval workflow is nothing but setting various conditions based on which approval levels are triggered. For instance, when it comes to expense report approval flow, you have to take various aspects into consideration. You have to understand whether the previous requests from the requester has been rejected/approved? Or is there any particular scenario we usually approve expense claims?
Intelligent workflows allow finance teams to distinguish and filter the true exceptions from the low-risk exception that is usually approved. This way, approval process becomes faster as employees do not need to wait for approvals while limiting the risk of out-of-policy claims.
Transforming Finance Department
How AI can impact finance is the most common question any finance manager has. By leveraging this technology, transactional jobs will become less critical while cross-functional and tech savviness become more critical. The systems must be built and integrated into existing operational systems and processes. However, the fast-changing business model can lower the number of resources required to perform finance operations.
Besides finance, many other business areas including HR, Procurement, and Legal will be equally affected. The best thing to do to make the most of the machine learning and artificial intelligence is to develop a learning culture so that your employees can stay ahead. It is better to familiarize yourself with artificial intelligence so that you can adapt swiftly and when needed.
Rachel works for SutiSoft, Inc as a web content writer. Rachel covers business, technology and SaaS trends.
