As your business expands, financial management can grow complicated quickly. If you’re in a growth phase, you may find that manual workflows that once worked well are no longer keeping up with rising transaction volumes, supporting evolving compliance standards or delivering the up-to-date business insights you need. The resulting delays, errors and inefficiencies can hinder your decision making and limit your ability to scale.
This guide examines how finance automation can help your business move beyond manual processes and optimize your invoicing, accounts payable, revenue recognition and financial reporting capabilities. Whether you want to enhance compliance, improve cash flow or enhance your reporting capabilities, you’ll find out how automation delivers the tools and confidence you need to succeed.
Table of Contents
- Why finance automation is crucial for scaling companies
- Automating accounts payable, accounts receivable and invoicing in NetSuite
- Finance automation for investor readiness
- Integrating automation with revenue recognition (NetSuite ARM)
- FAQs
Why finance automation is crucial for scaling companies
Growth brings opportunity – but it also brings complexity. As your business scales, managing increasing transaction volumes, diverse billing models, evolving compliance requirements and the demand for data-driven insights can expose the limitations of manual processes and siloed systems. Without financial process automation, these challenges create inefficiencies that slow your team down and limit your ability to make informed decisions. By automating key financial workflows, you can give your team the tools they need to stay agile and efficient no matter how fast your business grows.
The challenges of scaling financial processes
If your business hasn’t begun automating its financial processes, you may be experiencing one or more of these issues:
An inability to support growing transaction volumes
Handling thousands of invoices monthly for multiple vendors can overwhelm your finance team, especially when each invoice requires manual data entry, approval routing and reconciliation. In fact, 56% of finance teams report spending over 10 hours a week on manual invoice processing. This doesn’t only reduce productivity – it can also lead to duplicate or missed payments. In fact, according to the Accounts Payable Association, 63% of finance professionals have reported receiving duplicate invoices (and 33% had actually paid them).
Trouble handling complex billing models
Flexible billing options like usage-based pricing have grown popular – but they can make it difficult for finance teams to calculate dynamic charges, generate precise invoices and recognize revenue quickly and accurately. Manual billing processes just aren’t sustainable if your company offers dynamic pricing models. They not only create extra work – they can lead to significant revenue leakage, particularly if you need to handle complex billing issues.
Difficulties meeting regulatory obligations
Expanding into new markets or industries often means navigating strict compliance standards, such as ASC 606 or GDPR. Managing revenue recognition under these regulations requires your finance teams to track how revenue is earned and allocated across specific commitments, such as subscription terms or service deliverables. Reporting consistently across regions adds further complexity. If you’re using manual financial processes to meet your tracking and reporting obligations, you may have trouble filing accurately and on time – which can lead to penalties.
Delayed insights and decisions
Manual processes can make it time-consuming and labor-intensive to compile data from multiple systems. For example, if you’re a supply chain professional for a manufacturing company that wants to optimize its stock levels to meet upcoming orders, it may take days or weeks for you to extract and correlate the data you need from your customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and inventory platforms. This can introduce delays and inaccuracies in your ordering processes.
The benefits of finance automation
Finance automation transforms manual workflows into streamlined, scalable processes. By integrating financial automation solutions into your operations, you gain greater accuracy, higher productivity and actionable insights to support business growth. Here are the benefits that prompted some of our experts to explore whether automation is the future of finance.
Reduced manual entry and errors
Manual data entry often results in mismatched transactions, duplicate payments and wasted time. Automation eliminates these inefficiencies and improves the accuracy of your data. For instance, the ability to extract and categorize invoice data directly from vendor bills and emails means that your team can process thousands of invoices monthly without delays. And by automating payment matching, your team can spend less time reconciling discrepancies and finding errors – and more time focusing on forecasting and other strategic initiatives.
Improved compliance
Meeting regulations like ASC 606 or IFTS 15 requires consistent tracking, reporting and audit readiness. Automation tools like ZoneBilling and ZoneReporting help your team accurately link revenue with contracts and performance obligations while automatically generating compliance-ready reports. Automation is a must if your business operates across multiple entities or regions. It consolidates reporting from various subsidiaries and automatically converts currencies. This helps you meet local regulatory requirements while building consistency in your reporting.
Time savings on routine tasks
Billing, invoice processing, approvals and other routine tasks often consume hours of your finance team’s time each week. These routine tasks represent a prime opportunity to improve productivity with automation. For example, Amigo Mobility estimates it has saved over 700 hours annually by automating manual data entry, invoice posting and approvals. With automation, you’ll have more time to focus on scaling your operation rather than overseeing routine tasks. Perhaps that’s why 92% of respondents in a recent Deloitte survey feel that the type of work within finance will become more analytical over the next five years.
Enhanced decision-making through up-to-date data
Reporting delays due to manual workflows limit your ability to act on financial insights. Automation consolidates data from multiple systems into intuitive dashboards, providing you with up-to-date metrics for faster, more informed decision-making. When cash flow projections or overdue payment trends arise, automated systems deliver actionable insights in real time, allowing you to prioritize collections or adjust your spending accordingly.
Automating accounts payable, accounts receivable and invoicing in NetSuite
Finance teams often face inefficiencies, delays and errors when managing AP, accounts receivable (AR) and invoicing manually. These workflows are critical to maintaining cash flow, yet they can become unmanageable as transaction volumes grow. Financial automation in NetSuite turns these processes into efficient, accurate and scalable workflows that can help your team speed up collections and manage vendor payments more efficiently.
Accelerating accounts payable workflows
Capturing invoice data, routing approvals and reconciling payments can take days when done manually. Errors like duplicate payments or missed early-payment discounts are common and tend to grow with your transaction volumes. AP automation in NetSuite with tools like ZoneCapture simplifies these workflows by using optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract invoice details and standardize how they’re input into your ERP. And with automated approval routing and reconciliation, your entire procure-to-pay process happens faster and with less work from your team.
Learn how a fully automated procure-to-pay process helped enviolo improve its efficiency.
Strengthening accounts receivable collections
Manual AR processes can lead to an increase of up to 30% in your days sales outstanding (DSO) metric. With automation, you get accurate tracking of outstanding balances and overdue payment reminders that improve your collection rates. These tools help your team focus on collections strategically so you can reduce your DSO and improve cash flow. If you want to find out how much money you could save each year by automating invoice generation, billing and revenue recognition in NetSuite, try our DSO reduction calculator.
Simplifying invoicing for complex billing models
Usage-based billing or subscription models often require teams to calculate charges for thousands of customers with variable rates. Aggregating data and performing calculations by hand not only delays your invoices – it can also introduce errors that damage customer trust. For instance, a SaaS company that bills customers based on API usage might apply its various rate types and rate plans to its customer activity logs by hand, taking days or even weeks and introducing manual errors.
With billing automation, you can apply usage-based, tiered and a wide range of pricing structures to customer usage data automatically and directly within your ERP to create accurate, timely invoices every cycle. This helps your team spend less time on billing and more time on activities that support growth, all while accelerating revenue recognition.
Finance automation for investor readiness
As your business grows, delivering the financial clarity investors need becomes more challenging – particularly if you’re using manual processes. Financial process automation helps you build accuracy, speed and transparency into your workflows so you can keep your investors well-informed.
Ensuring accuracy in financial reporting
Whether it’s for a quarterly board meeting or a major funding event, investors rely on accurate financial data to assess your business’s performance. Manual workflows, however, can lead to inconsistencies and errors, especially when consolidating financial data across multiple entities. For instance, reconciling financials from subsidiaries operating in different currencies often requires you to standardize data and perform conversions that can introduce errors and delay reporting.
Automation helps you gather accurate data consistently and quickly by creating a unified data and reporting platform and automating your reporting workflows. This makes consolidating data across your subsidiaries seamless while creating confidence in the reports and numbers you present to investors and other stakeholders.
Accelerating financial close processes
Closing the books on time is critical for investor updates, but manual processes often delay this effort. Tasks like reconciling accounts, adjusting journal entries and verifying the accuracy of the general ledger (GL) can occupy your team for weeks without automation, leaving your investors waiting for the information they need.
With finance automation, these tasks are completed in the regular course of business rather than at closing time. ZoneBilling, for instance, automatically creates a bill in NetSuite upon deal closure in Salesforce to take the manual work out of the close process and cut revenue recognition time significantly. Automating your approvals with a tool like ZoneApprovals can also keep you ahead of the close process by preventing backups at the end of the month or year. Automating bank reconciliation with a tool like ZoneReconcile can make the closing process faster and more accurate for bank, credit card and PSP accounts.
To learn more about how automation can speed up your close process, see our year-end checklist.
Enhancing transparency and up-to-date insights
Investors value transparency in your company’s financial health, but manual reporting limits your ability to create an up-to-date view or respond to time-sensitive requests. That’s because generating detailed financial reports often requires you to pull data from multiple systems and create custom reports by hand.
Automation integrates financial data into centralized dashboards, providing up-to-date insights at a moment’s notice. For instance, an automated system pulling live cash flow and revenue trends directly from your ERP allows you to share near-real-time performance metrics with investors. This level of transparency strengthens investor confidence and positions your business as a reliable partner. If you think it may be time to evaluate your reporting capabilities, our financial reporting health check can help.
Automating revenue recognition and integrating with NetSuite ARM
Revenue recognition is one of the most complex and regulated financial processes. This is particularly the case for businesses managing subscription-based or usage-based billing models. Manual workflows make it difficult to align revenue with performance obligations and comply with ASC 606 regulations.
NetSuite’s advanced revenue management (ARM) simplifies revenue recognition by automating tasks like revenue forecasting, allocation, reclassification and auditing directly within your ERP. It supports compliance with ASC 606 by using rule-based configurations to align revenue with performance obligations. However, challenges arise when billing gets complex or when contract changes such as upgrades, downgrades or end-date extensions – require manual intervention.
This is where a billing automation solution like ZoneBilling can enhance NetSuite ARM. ZoneBilling automatically keeps billing and revenue schedules in sync when contract changes occur. Whether you’re managing subscription renewals, usage-based charges or deferred revenue adjustments, this integration minimizes manual work while maintaining compliance and precision in revenue recognition. It also helps build trust with your investors and key stakeholders by allowing you to provide them with up-to-date and accurate revenue reports whenever they’re needed.
Frequently asked questions about finance automation
What is finance automation?
Financial automation refers to the use of technology to streamline financial processes like invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, reconciliation and financial reporting. If you’ve wondered what are automated financial systems, they are tools that replace manual workflows with automated processes to improve efficiency and accuracy. By adopting automated financial services, your teams can reduce errors, save time, remain compliant and access the up-to-date data they need to make informed decisions.
What are the risks of finance automation?
While financial automation and financial process automation offer significant benefits, there are potential risks. Poor implementation of automated financial systems can disrupt workflows, especially if existing processes aren’t standardized before automation. Data security is another concern, as automated financial solutions often handle sensitive information. However, selecting a reliable ERP like NetSuite, and working with an experienced solutions partner can minimize these risks and help ensure a smooth transition.
What is FP&A automation?
Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) automation involves leveraging technology to optimize budgeting, forecasting and performance analysis. Automated financial solutions streamline tasks like data consolidation, variance analysis and financial reporting, giving your finance team more time to focus on strategic planning. For example, automating rolling forecasts allows you to adapt quickly to market changes, while updated dashboards provide insights into profitability and revenue trends.
Empower your business with finance automation
Finance automation isn’t just about streamlining processes – it’s about giving your teams the tools they need to operate efficiently, scale confidently and make informed decisions quickly. As your business grows, the complexity of managing financial workflows, meeting compliance requirements and providing insights to stakeholders can become overwhelming. With automated solutions, you can eliminate these bottlenecks and focus on driving strategic growth.
Whether you’re optimizing accounts payable, enhancing revenue recognition, meeting compliance obligations or keeping your investors informed, financial automation delivers measurable value by reducing errors, saving time and unlocking actionable data points.
Now is the time to future-proof your operations. Talk to one of our experts today to explore how financial automation can transform your team’s workflows and position your business for long-term success.
