Why you should optimize your financial processes while it’s still 2022

Have you ever heard yourself or your colleagues talk this way?

“Our way of processing invoices is certainly not the most effective or productive one at the moment, we know that. It’s an issue we plan to address sometime soon, though!”

“We often exceeded our budgets this year as well, because not all expenses were apparent from the planning and we were nastily surprised when the numbers were finally fully available. It’s such a big issue, it takes time and we don’t have that until the end of this year!”

In conversation with potential finway customers, we have heard sentences like the above ones quite often lately. Once more companies rather decide to head towards the end of the year “as usual”, and then, when everything is fresh and new in the balance again, they may plan on tackling issues like expense management, invoice processing, expense reimbursement, better budgeting, or generally digitizing accounting.

Because – traditionally or according to common practice (the good resolutions…) the turn of the year is gladly used to clean up with old habits and to do everything differently or better in the new year.

But here we ask ourselves:

Reason 1: Every day you lose more time and money

Perhaps you haven’t questioned the current handling of internal finances for a long time – thinking that’s just how it’s done and that it takes time for a payment to be approved or an invoice to be fully processed?

But then you also know the frustration that sometimes arises when it is unclear who has to release a payment, approve an invoice or a purchase or which means of payment are available (“Where is the company credit card?”) – and this causes avoidable delays in the daily work routine.

And last but not least, it is not uncommon for you to even lose cash discounts if invoices remain unpaid for too long because they are accidentally forgotten and only end up back on the table with the 1st reminder.

But you have it in your hands to turn the tide. Think about…

In most small and medium-sized companies, optimizing these daily work processes would save several days per month, which employees could use for more meaningful tasks. And last but not least, the entire budget planning would finally get more clarity.

All of this sounds like enough arguments to address the issue, but why now, as the year draws to a close? Read on:

The new fiscal year & budget planning in one place.

How about starting the new year and having clarity from start to finish, not only in the finance department, but for everyone else as well? This is possible – by using software like finway to plan and map your budgets for all departments individually and flexibly for the entire year.

If you are already set up here at the beginning of a new fiscal year, you can map the entire course of the year in one tool and compare the individual months with each other – and learn from this now for the next year.

You get a clear overview with a real-time view that is automatically updated with each new (planned) purchase. If a budget is in danger, the purchase can be rejected and postponed to the following month, or you can make the decision to increase the budget for that month. In any case, you know about it from the start and there are no nasty surprises.

This means you can react in good time at any time if, for example, a large expense threatens to burst the budget. And you finally know where the money in your company is actually going.

For you and your employees, this is the ideal training period.

The changeover to a financial management system like finway does not take as much time as you might think, but it may take a bit of effort and, above all, an appetite for innovation. After all, the conversion of financial processes requires the involvement of everyone in the company. That means all employees who spend company money as part of their job (whether through company funds or personal expenses) needs to take part.

Some people find it easier to get used to changed processes, for others it takes a few days until everything is integrated seamlessly and effortlessly. Humans are creatures of habit and the major part of a process change takes place in the head. Just a few examples:

Back to the main question: Why change just now, shortly before the end of the year? The answer is simple: If you want to start next year from the beginning with optimized processes, you and your employees can use the remaining weeks to change over and get used to the new software.

Because: You can of course also onboard a new financial software without having to retroactively import the whole current year. So in the remaining weeks of the year, you can bring your employees into the tool, set up workflows and test them with, let’s call it, motivated composure.

One customer told us:

“As an admin, I didn’t get any queries about the application from my colleagues. No “where do I have to press when I want to release something”, etc. You get a message when you need to do something, you can approve, reject invoices or applications, or post a comment.”

And last but not least, all the benefits of introducing financial software for your processes don’t just start in the new year – even now you will realize how much time and nerves can be saved when the processes finally run smoothly.