If you could bottle and harness high levels of productivity, you’d make millions. Knowing how to improve employee productivity is comparable to striking oil, especially in the finance sector. Between monotonous — but completely necessary— processes such as data matching, variance analysis and company-specific close tasks, it’s easy for your efficiency to dip a little in the close process.

The Innovation Enterprise released an article discussing the importance of company productivity and how upgrading your technology boosts it.

Besides the obvious benefits that new technology introduces, such as faster processing capabilities and improved security software, it also lifts morale. Implementing a new piece of technology lightens your employees’ workload by taking away manual steps and unnecessary variances in process, meaning results are faster and improved overall –  your processes become more consistent, especially from a finance perspective.

And while it’s true that updating technology can be costly if handled incorrectly, The Innovation Enterprise continues on in their article to provide a few tips and tricks for mitigating costs, such as how to correctly time your upgrades, to help make updating your technology more affordable.

Oftentimes, upgrading technology within the office of finance isn’t high up on the priority list for companies. However, it’s important to really think about what’s involved in your close process; there are so many moving parts — spreadsheets moving from reconciliation to certification and compliance into a word processing document into a spreadsheet and so forth. Relying on outdated technology and error-prone spreadsheets for an already-complex process sets your finance team, and ultimately your company, up for failure.

Support your team by equipping it for success; invest in financial automation. Not only will you boost your finance team’s productivity, but you will maximize every penny you spend on upgrading.

To read the Innovation Enterprise article in full, please click here.

Alternatively, if you would like to learn more about how financial automation can boost your team’s productivity and value, check out our ebook, “The Business Case for an Automated Close”.

Written by: Ashton Mathai & Caleb Walter