Context

Finance & Accounting

Finance and accounting teams manage processes like invoicing, payroll, reimbursements, budgeting, forecasting, and more. Each of these essential processes likely suffer from inefficiencies due to:

• Repetitive tasks
• Poor integration with existing software tools
• Old, legacy systems that force finance teams to work inefficiently 

Organizations that modernize their financial systems and optimize their processes will reap savings in time, money, and mental bandwidth. Fortunately, SimplyAsk provides unique software solutions – including our Symphona platform and consulting services – that can help finance and accounting teams expedite and optimize their work.

SimplyAsk can help organizations tackle some of the following common challenges in finance and accounting: 

Invoicing Challenges

Invoices are essential to conducting business but can also be a major source of frustration. Manual invoice processing can cost $12-30 each when done manually. Managing invoices manually can be time-consuming, confusing, and error-prone, leading to delays and frustration for organizations and customers. 

The most common problems include difficulty accurately tracking all services provided, understanding special contractual procedures, and navigating rejections due to incorrect filing. Organizations must also stay updated on constantly changing rules, timely submission of correct forms, and regulatory requirements to ensure they get paid timely and correctly. 

Moreover, inadequate resource planning and a lack of sophisticated systems can amplify these issues. Investment in technology solutions is one way to help address these challenges. 

Reimbursement Challenges

Reimbursement can be a complicated process. It requires staying updated with the latest guidelines, policies, and practices. Finance teams must take multiple steps, such as researching contracts and filing the correct paperwork to receive payment for services rendered. 

To ensure success with reimbursements, it is essential to develop processes that comply with regulations while keeping those seeking reimbursements informed of what rules they must comply with to successfully seek reimbursement. 

Payroll Challenges 

Payroll is an essential business function and comes with many complexities and challenges, such as:

• Flagging Time-sheet Errors and Omissions: Time-sheet amendments and omissions must be accurate. If alterations are made, they are usually detected manually and require extensive research. If errors remain unseen, it will result in an inaccurate payroll system and unreliable customer service.
• Auditing Reported Hours Against Schedule: A detailed comparison of shift schedules, details of when employees clocked in and out, time off requests, and any allowances must occur regularly to ensure accurate payroll, while allowing for any changes. 
• Calculating Deductions:  Calculating payroll deductions requires knowledge of the applicable laws and the proper tools to ensure accuracy. This process can be particularly difficult when dealing with changing deductions or multiple employee classes and pay rates. Employers must keep records of all calculations to provide legal documentation at any time, as mistakes or miscalculations can lead to costly fines and penalties.
• Harmonizing Data Across Multiple Time-Keeping Systems: Depending on your organization's size and complexity, multiple steps are required to ensure accurate and compliant data transfer between two or more systems. This involves carefully reviewing current protocols and critically comparing existing practices with regional, national and international legal obligations.

Account Reconciliation Challenges

Reconciling accounts is one of finance professionals' most difficult and time-consuming tasks. It requires careful attention and a thorough approach, as discrepancies between records can occur due to honest mistakes or deliberate fraud. These discrepancies can arise from differences in accounting methodologies, a failure to record transactions, or an oversight when reconciling distributions.

While thoroughness is important, this can result in account reconciliation taking days or even weeks to complete. This can take even longer when accounting for third-party account reconciliation, especially if an organization lacks a properly managed and organized system.  

Companies looking to save time and money should immediately optimize their reconciliation processes by investing in a reliable automation software tool.

Accounts Payable Challenges

AP teams receive thousands of emails per month. Typically, these inboxes are manually sorted, triaged, and managed by a team of AP clerks, resulting in many inefficiencies and errors. These include:

• Failure to collect all emails: manually sorting through emails means your organization is guaranteed to miss a few – and some of those may be important payable items
• Dealing with irrelevant emails: many email requests are either intended for other teams or include simple queries that can be answered elsewhere, wasting your AP team’s time
• A lack of task management tools and operational metrics: without well-designed task management tools, AP teams are even more prone to duplicate tasks and  miss important action items. Without metrics, team managers cannot make meaningful process changes.

By using Symphona’s automation and AI capabilities to optimize various processes within AP, your organization can automatically manage low-priority items, flag high-priority payables, and automatically assign a ticket for an AP clerk to manage, saving your team time, money, and manpower. 

Solutions

How SimplyAsk Helps Finance & Accounting

SimplyAsk can support modernization and optimization efforts throughout an organization’s financial systems and processes. We can execute through all three phases of our service methodology. 

Strategic Planning and Architecture Design

If your organization feels its current infrastructure and architecture is failing to support its invoicing, reimbursement, and payroll needs, SimplyAsk can help plan and execute your new infrastructure and architecture goals. Our team will help clarify your goals, plan resource allocation, and account for potential risks.  

SimplyAsk develops infrastructures with scalability and flexibility in mind, ensuring our solutions can adapt to your evolving organizational needs and accommodate growth. We select technologies that enable seamless expansion without sacrificing performance or reliability. 

Application and Data Migration

If your organization is still using old and inefficient legacy systems for your financial processes, SimplyAsk can help modernize your digital system and data architecture, improving your financial workflows. Our migration projects typically follow a phased approach, where we perform a comprehensive assessment of existing systems to create a detailed migration roadmap for your organization, including activities, milestones, and resource allocation.

By using our Symphona Migrate tool and our AI-powered conversion tools,  SimplyAsk can dramatically expedite the data migration and transformation processes while managing fallouts and ensuring data integrity and compatibility. 

Process Optimization and Automation

By utilizing Symphona Flow and Resolve, organizations can streamline many or all of their financial processes.

Improving Invoicing

Flow offers new possibilities for making invoicing processes more efficient. Flow can automate tedious, repetitive tasks and improve accuracy by removing manual errors. In essence, this technology enables invoices to be delivered faster, with fewer mistakes and higher accuracy. With Flow, the time it takes to perform complicated invoicing tasks can be reduced significantly - possibly within a matter of hours. 

Additionally, individuals can achieve improved transparency in the invoicing process through automated audit trails that store the history and process of each transaction. As such, organizations can save money while providing customers with an enhanced experience in terms of delivery times and attitude toward customer service.

Resolve can effectively capture data from all documents and profiles, making it easy to organize them uniformly. It enables faster invoice processing by cutting manual scanning tasks and helping to increase accuracy by eliminating discrepancies between invoice data. The technology further simplifies tracking information, such as customer names, policies pre-filled on forms, and due dates, all of which help save time on bookkeeping while reducing paperwork. 

With Resolve, organizations can focus their resources on other important matters in an efficient manner.

Improving Reimbursements

Flow can automate and streamline the process of calculating reimbursements and speeding up payments. It can also streamline data entry, traversing multiple windows to identify needed information and make calculations quickly and accurately. With error-free speed, greater accuracy, compliance monitoring, and lower costs in labour and implementation, Flow can help insurers reduce unnecessary labour costs while still producing quality results.

Resolve can simplify data entry and ensure fast and accurate reimbursements by scanning images or physical documents, such as official invoices containing crucial information needed for the process. Decreasing manual effort and resource requirements improve accuracy while reducing processing time and associated costs. Resolve’s ability to identify characters can dramatically reduce several business challenges, such as inefficient billing cycles and erroneous payments. 

Improving Payroll

Flow provides organizations with streamlined automation to help them manage their payroll functions more efficiently. It automates the mundane tasks involved in processes like payroll, reducing manual effort and increasing speed and accuracy by eliminating human errors. 

Flow also enables organizations to quickly adjust personnel pay rates and track changes throughout their system with minimal effort, saving valuable time and resources. It can detect incorrect data entry, streamline administrative workflows, generate real-time reports, and reduce overhead costs associated with paying staff. By leveraging Flow, organizations can ensure smooth payroll operations while providing better services to their employees.

Resolve drastically reduces time verifying information, as it can automatically recognize and process documents. Instead of manually comparing and verifying inputs, it enables an automated mechanism that flags out errors in data. This process is also faster and more reliable, resulting in fewer manual interventions from staff members. Resolve enables back-tracking information to identify incorrect claims or proof-of-work requirements during payroll validation. These factors make Resolve invaluable for organizations while managing payroll processes efficiently and accurately.

Improving Account Reconciliation

Using Flow to automate tedious and time-consuming tasks within account reconciliation can eliminate tedious data entry, lower labour costs, reduce errors, accelerate closing timeline completion, and improve customer experience. Flow’s dashboards can help your organization monitor progress and identify areas for improvement in real time, facilitating greater efficiency while ensuring compliance with necessary regulations. 

Converse vastly improves the account closure process by providing faster, more accurate customer service through its knowledge base and generative AI capabilities. Converse can quickly and organically answer frequently asked questions and guide them through the account closure process more accurately and efficiently. By using AI, employees save time handling queries, letting them focus on other tasks that require their attention. 

Resolve can expedite tedious data entry processes when closing an account, drastically reducing completion times. With Resolve, customers can experience a much more user-friendly interface and accurately input their information with fewer errors. This simplicity makes it easier for customer service representatives to identify problems or discrepancies during verification or any other step in the closure process.

Improving Accounts Payable Processes

AP triage processes can be optimized by using Flow and Serve to automate email capture, categorization, and service ticketing so that your AP team has more capacity to focus on the most critical payable items.

Here’s an example of how our AP Inbox Management & Automation Solution works:

1. Emails sent to the AP inbox are forwarded to the SimplyAsk Platform (via simple email address forwarding)
2. Our AI categorizes your emails into some number of categories
3. Based on the category, either:some text
   1. An intelligent auto-reply is sent to the sender (using generative AI with the company’s existing knowledge base), or;
   2. Serve creates a service ticket with the email contents (text and attachments) for an AP Clerk to work on
4. The AP team can easily track and manage follow-up tasks and prioritization to optimize the AP process

Organizations can orchestrate the entire AP triage process using Flow’s advanced workflow automation capabilities. Flow can navigate the contents of every email in an inbox, determine whether it can or cannot reply based on RPA flags, use generative AI to send intelligent auto-replies for simple queries, and connect with Serve to create service tickets for more complex action items. Flow can also integrate with existing internal and third-party systems via API, providing your team flexibility with how you use it alongside your current technical stack.

For any errors in workflow automation, Resolve can manage and automatically triage any business exceptions (fallouts). Resolve integrates tightly with Flow to reduce exception resolution effort and help your organization focus more on your core mission.

For managing service tickets with ease, Serve allows for automatic task management and follow up tasks with minimal configuration. By integrating it with Flow teams can use the smart assignment tool, ensuring that AP clerks are automatically assigned tasks based on their urgency and complexity. By automating this process, AP clerks can focus their time on high-priority AP items.   

Overall, for every aspect of your organization’s financial systems and processes, SimplyAsk solutions can help modernize and optimize them so that your finance team can reap massive savings in time and money while having improved productivity and efficiency. Contact our sales team today and get a free consultation on how your organization can use SimplyAsk solutions.