Survey shows too many hours wasted on manual accounting. Automation can help.

From our data, the majority of finance and accounting teams have a systems and software budget in the $25,000 to $200,000 range. Almost all listed some sort of general ledger accounting software, with Intuit QuickBooks, Oracle NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and Xero comprising the top choices. While other software solutions were listed in their fintech stack, those tools were used by fewer than 20% of respondents. A significant number still rely on spreadsheet software: 31% use Google Sheets and 48% use Microsoft Excel. Heavy reliance on spreadsheets is a hallmark of small to midsize company finance team operations, but building them, and then exporting the data in them, are manual tasks.

The survey’s findings back this up. Take a look at the responses from finance professionals when asked which tasks were done manually. At Airbase, we built an integrated spend management platform to address each one.

• 56% currently reconcile bank statements manually.
  With an automated spend management system, bank reconciliations are made easy because they report bank activity and spend activity on the same basis rather than the bank numbers being consolidated.

• 42% spend time gathering documentation to create audit trails.
  A spend management system creates a full audit trail of the entire spend lifecycle, including the approval chain, categorization, tags, vendor information, and payment details. With a full transaction record created as each step occurs, nobody has to hunt down documentation when it is needed.

• 41% fix errors manually. Manual tasks are inherently inaccurate. Automated processes (especially around categorization) reduce this risk — and automated controls further ensure accuracy.

• 38% gather information manually in order to create interim reports for outside teams.
  Stakeholders need self-service access to reporting when needed, and this distributed access is possible with spend management. Furthermore, since all expense reporting is consolidated, there is a single source of truth, eliminating the need to gather information from disparate sources.

• 36% of respondents use spreadsheets and CSV files to transfer data manually.
  When data syncs automatically to the GL, spreadsheet control is no longer an issue. In fact, spreadsheets aren’t needed at all.

• 34% process purchase orders manually.
  In a modern spend management system, automated approval workflows can eliminate the need for purchase orders, and requests, vendor documents, and payments are stored in one place, without any required paperwork. And when a purchase order is required, an automated spend management platform like Airbase creates one, then uses OCR technology to attach an invoice to a transaction record, and creates a bill that can be matched against the PO, all without any manual effort.

• 32% perform manual categorizations for expenses.
  When an expense report is reviewed by an approver before money is spent, all information, including the expense category, is identified and reviewed up front. Machine learning can further automate this process by coding expenses  according to past patterns. ‍

• 30% code transactions to the GL manually.
  A direct integration to the General Ledger for virtual card purchases, plus an automated sync for all others, eliminates this time suckand helps companies move towards a continuous close.

Relying on the manual work necessitated by using multiple, disparate systems has a domino effect on other tasks, most notably the month-end close, with 61% of our respondents saying they took at least one week to close, and 18% saying it took more than two weeks. In contrast, companies who have moved to an automated and consolidated spend management system, where all spend data is consolidated and synced automatically to the GL, report that they’ve cut their time-to-close in half, and some have been able to move to a continuous, or rolling, close.