5 Reasons Automation Is Key to Advancing Your Finance Career

When we used to imagine the innovations of the future, a lot of them took things off our plates. Picture the character of Rosey the Robot from the popular cartoon, The Jetsons – her job was to make things easier. So, why don’t we have the same attitude around automation in our careers?

“Used judiciously, automation, AI and related software can supplement your efforts,” says Thea Dudley, a credit and financial management consultant with over 30 years of experience. “They allow you to focus your attention on other opportunities, like large-scale projects that can advance your career.”

When we asked sales professionals how they spent their days in our research study The Sales vs. Credit Control Battle, the replies were eye-opening. As the study revealed, 58% of the respondents said they spend between one and four hours a day on manual data entry tasks. Just think about that for a second. If automation removed the need for those manual jobs, you could free up to four hours of time in a day to work on larger financial planning and credit management projects.

For example, you might be working side-by-side with the executive team on setting business plans for the next 2-3 years. You could also be asked to take the lead on an intensive project where you’re leading multiple teams from within the company. The more strategic work you do (and are seen to do within your company), the more likely you are to be chosen for additional strategic projects, internal promotions and advisory roles with customers. Plus, you can spend more time doing in-depth credit risk analysis on prospects and customers. With those initial checks out of the way for you, you can protect your business’ cash flow and minimize risks by diving deep into your customers ever time, not just when you’re worried.  

How many times have you seen a job posting looking for candidates who are flexible? “Ability to work with changing priorities in a fast-paced environment” ringing any bells? When you use automation to streamline your day-to-day tasks, you’re much less tethered to a specific process. 

Let’s say you’re a finance manager working without automation. Every day, you manually evaluate potential deals that the sales team are looking to get approved. You’re good at your job and dedicated to making sure that your business doesn’t accidentally work with late payers, for example, so you carefully check each business credit report for things like a fluctuating DBT and legal filings. You get the results, but it can take a long time to perform those manual checks. 

Then, your company suddenly decides it needs to also focus on expanding into a new territory. It’s going to mean a lot of new projects for the finance team. But because you’re spending so much time on your current tasks, it means you can’t put yourself forward for some of those new opportunities. Over time, you could find yourself becoming pigeonholed in just one element of your job function, which could limit your future career growth. 

If you were using automation in your day-to-day, things could look very different. With manual tasks taken care of, it’s much easier to collaborate with other teams and work towards new or changing goals. You could continue to make the right call on new deals and contribute to that business expansion project at the same time, juggling more projects and proving to your company that you bring more than just one set of skills to the table.  

Our research has found that 82% of businesses use either a full or partially manual credit decisioning process.  Now consider this: 49% of the respondents in our study believed their credit decision process was rigid and ineffective because it was too reliant on manual processes, or it was taking too long to reach a decision. 

Clearly, the push-back against financial process automation can mean businesses aren’t reaching their full potential. Remember what I said earlier about automation potentially freeing up 1-4 hours of time in a day? Now picture that across an entire team. Productivity has the potential to soar to new heights when automation is being used responsibly. 

You may be thinking about those cases where automation can’t help. Not every credit decision is straightforward, after all. In fact, our research found that 46% of finance managers said between 50-99% of their weekly credit decisions require in-depth analysis. But that doesn’t mean automation isn’t helpful in those cases. When you’re able to take some of the smaller manual jobs off your plate, you can focus more fully on the more complicated decisions. And that means you’re less likely to let problems slip through the cracks, bringing your business less risky decisions, more often.