What is autonomous finance and why is it important?
Times are changing. No one likes to stick with old, outdated, and manual processes. Neither do the finance professionals. The influence of technology on finance is higher than ever.
We have cloud computing now that’s ruling every department of organizations and finance isn’t left alone.
From budget estimation to cash flow monitoring everything machines can take decisions, and finance managers can have better visibility and control over internal money management.
That’s exactly what autonomous finance stands for. Financial process automation simplifies every aspect of financial management and lets managers focus on the bigger picture that leads to strategic fiscal distribution.
What is autonomous finance?
While finance and accounting may look like two separate entities, they are strongly inter-connected and require perfect synchronization, collaboration, and coordination.
More often than not, finance teams yield to the pressure as they start micro-managing the accounting team and take ineffective financial decisions.
What they need are autonomous finance solutions that won’t further muddle your financial control.
Autonomous finance is when a company seeks assistance from high-end technologies like artificial intelligence to not just automate financial operations but also to make complex decisions.
Think about being in a self-driving car. You neither drive nor control the vehicle, and trust the device to make the right decision based on the data feed and analysis.
Now the automated car is the autonomous finance solution and the passenger is the finance manager of the company.
It analyzes the present and past and takes algorithmic-driven decisions to drive the company’s financial and accounting operations.
How artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming finance solutions?
Artificial intelligence plays an integral role in converting regular automation to a cognitive one.
One can make the operations more convenient, precise, and data-driven.
These grades are instrumental in making successful financial decisions and budgeting plans and autonomous finance operations guarantee that.
Expense and invoice processing
Invoice processing and vendor management can take mammoth amounts of time and energy.
Any mistake in this, you appear unprofessional to your vendor or lose money to the wrong person. AI can simplify this task and make it manageable.
Something great about AI is that it learns over time by studying data and patterns and becomes self-dependent very sooner, giving birth to autonomous finance operations. Here is what happens in an AI-based invoice processing method.
Data entry is time-consuming and precision sensitive. But AI can accurately capture and key in the information that the incoming invoice carries through OCR or cognitive data methods.
These technologies have the power to extract data from even the most unintelligible, handwritten invoices.
AI can also do invoice matching with the purchase order and prepare the bill for the next stage.
Due to automated capture and verification, human intervention is downright avoided and increased productivity and efficiency is achieved as employees don’t indulge in mundane tasks.
End-to-end AI processing for autonomous finance operations
Big companies are known for dealing with huge chunks of data. They don’t have time to go through all of it or to come up with an informed, iterative solution.
What they do instead is use AI-based tools to derive insights and many other useful findings from them. A set of data contains more than just numbers and characters.
AI gives the financial team the potential to unlock this extensive data and exposes the hidden messages.
And in some cases, it takes the step forward, applies its learnings, brings about the envisioned changes, and duly generates autonomous finance solutions.
Financing, in practical terms, is all about modifying your path based on your learnings and experiences.
AI, like a good employee, learns from the mistakes and enhances its autonomous finance operations in the next cycle. Thus, for end-to-end financial process automation, AI gives its everything to fully automate the financial functions with 100% efficiency.
Related read - Role of AI in fintech industry explained
How do new autonomous finance solutions impact your business?
So, you might be wondering how autonomous finance can change your business.
Whether it will replace the current financial experts you have or increase your budget.
For starters, it majorly has a positive effect and produces expected results.
Here are the benefits you can expect and enjoy by implementing autonomous finance solutions.
1. Higher efficiency
It’s a given that machines are faster than humans and the odds of an error happening are less here.
Humans tend to reduce their effort over time while doing a repetitive task.
Contrary to this, automated applications work with the same speed and ensure that it gets finished with utmost accuracy without any delay.
Business owners know the consequences of delayed expense processing and its impact on business continuity and wouldn’t want to risk that.
2. Promises more than mere data extraction and copy-pasting
AI possesses cognitive understanding and acumen to understand the process instead of merely doing the work and raising flags on minor deviations.
They can extensively offer support throughout the expense processing task other than what they are meant to work on.
Of every other team, finance is the one that can always use an analytical and time-variant insider perspective.
Autonomous finance promises that and gives you a bird’s eye view of your business finances.
3. Scale without hesitation
If you face a sudden surge in expense handling, AI will gladly take up more work and help you finish on time. You don’t have to think about hiring more employees.
How Volopay can improve efficiency for businesses?
The boon of running a business in the digital era is getting hands-on access to a diversified range of tools that serve different purposes.
One significant application that any business from any industry can use and is actually in dire need of is expense automation solutions.
Finance teams want to feel included in accounting tasks and get an overview of what’s happening in the expense department.
For that to happen, one needs an open-ended, automated, and transparent system that systematically makes the payments and collects the records.
Volopay is one such expense management tool that can streamline your all outgoing payments and keep track of every penny spent.
You can update your expense policies and set up approvals to verify the payment source and destination.
The finance team will feel at ease as they have the power to not just monitor but also have real-time control over the accounts receivable.
Volopay helps you schedule your outgoing payments beforehand to avoid late payments and even international payments are a breeze with its swift delivery and low FX charges.
Volopay also offers you unlimited virtual corporate cards that either you can distribute to your employees or assign to different departments to take care of their respective online and subscription payments.
Multi-currency accounts, no-collateral credit, reimbursements, budgets, and API integrations with other accounting software are its other features worth mentioning.
Here is how Volopay facilitates autonomous finance operations in your organization.
• You can create a vendor within minutes, manage all vendors in one place, pay using a different currency, and automate their recurring and one-time payments.
• Autonomous finance is all about letting an application take charge of the financial process automation with the least human intervention.
• Volopay has a smart integration facility that communicates with applications it connects to and synchronizes the data.
• Employee expenses are often excluded while counting in incurred expenses.
Autonomous finance solutions should have the scope to automate this process from submitting an expense report to getting approved to receiving the money back.
Volopay helps you do that and minimizes the struggle to submit the claim for employees while allowing employers to follow every step and store precise documents pertinent to expenses.
It’s incredible how effortlessly Volopay makes reimbursements happen within a single platform, approves/reject in a jiffy, and releases the payments accordingly.
Financial process automation is important for any organization that wants to wisely manage its resources and make well-thought-out budget decisions.
It can be achieved only when you have a true autonomous finance system in place that works on auto-pilot on your behalf. Volopay is cut out for that job.
Without compromising your data safety and finance team’s budget, make Volopay work for you to systemize your outgoing points and propel efficient autonomous finance operations.
Switch to Volopay and take your finance operations to greater heights
Financial process automation is important for any organization that wants to wisely manage its resources and make well-thought-out budget decisions.
It can be achieved only when you have a true autonomous finance system in place that works on auto-pilot on your behalf. Volopay is cut out for that job.
Without compromising your data safety and finance team’s budget, make Volopay work for you to systemize your outgoing points and propel efficient autonomous finance operations.