7 Ways Emerging Technology is Changing Your Company’s Accounting

Artificial intelligence and automation are making tremendous changes to all areas of business operations, and your in-house accounting is no exception.

In recent months, countless accounting software solutions and tools have incorporated these emerging technologies in order to improve accuracy, save time and increase efficiencies for finance teams. With these significant improvements, there’s no better time for companies to review their current tools, re-assess their needs and consider new options.

Here, we’ve outlined seven areas where these advancements are improving different pieces of the accounting cycle—and how today’s companies are benefitting.

ERP (General Ledger) Package

Depending on your company’s general ledger package, some tools are offering more anticipatory features.

For example, if you’re booking the same accrual every month, rather than having to type all the pieces in for an entry, a tool could suggest an accrual entry based on your previous entries. This cuts down on the time that finance teams spend on manual entry, allowing them to increase their focus on more strategic tasks.

Some tools can also detect and flag anomalies based on your typical patterns, which can help identify unauthorized or fraudulent activities faster than ever before.

Payroll

Payroll tools are advancing significantly with automation features. Instead of relying on manual effort from a payroll employee, payroll systems can now automatically send timesheets and reminders to your employees, identify payroll anomalies and streamline the approval process.

Payroll software is also beginning to incorporate advanced benchmarking features, allowing companies to see how their employees’ compensation compares to outside payroll standards.

Accounts Payable

New features allow some accounts payable software to pull invoices in from different sources (like invoices your team receives via email, invoices that are received in the mail and then scanned in, etc.).

Once received, these tools can leverage artificial intelligence to “read” these invoices, identify key information (the amount, dates, what services or products were provided) and provide a coding recommendation for the expense.

These tools are also able to streamline your workflows by automatically routing invoices to the proper parties for approvals based on the type of expense, the vendor, the services or products received and the amount.
These tools can significantly decrease the time that finance teams spend on handling documents, following up with team members to get approvals and manually pulling data from invoices.

Leases

Some tools are now able to identify embedded leases within a document.

Even for governmental organizations (following GASB standards), these tools can identify whether something is an actual lease or if it’s a software contract, and then suggest where it fits within their financial statements.

Because these tools can pull out certain key attributes pertaining to a lease (start date, end date, monthly payment, etc.), the software can save significant time and effort on reporting.

Employee Expenses

New software features can look at the receipts your employees submit and automatically determine what type of expense it is, significantly reducing manual effort and questions. (Is it a meal? Is the expense IT related? Is the receipt a travel related expense?)

These tools can also compare expense details to your organization’s specific policies. For example, your software may be able to recognize if employees are only able to get reimbursed up to a certain amount—helping both your employees and payroll staff stay in compliance with your organization’s specific guidelines.

Sales Tax Reporting

Each state and local jurisdiction has different regulations, and new accounting software features can help companies more effectively manage these considerations by summarizing different regulations for different jurisdictions, making state and local tax reporting more efficient.

General Accounting Processes and Business Intelligence

Some solutions known as low code software or no code software can help extract information from existing sources, which can speed up your processes and improve reporting accuracy.

These tools can pull together different sources of data (whether that’s from a report reader, your general ledger system, the internet, your email inbox, etc.), combine them, clean them, reconcile them, present them visually and produce a report you can use for month-end close or to gain deeper business insights.

Learn More about How Technology is Influencing Your Company’s Accounting

New technology has already made a significant impact on accounting. And it’s only going to improve from here.

Yet, as beneficial as these tools are, implementing them can be complicated. It’s up to companies to select the right tools for their business, maintain proper oversight of these tools and ensure that the tools are being implemented correctly.

For more information about how technology is changing accounting processes and tools, or to learn more about evaluating your current accounting software, reach out to your Warren Averett advisor directly or ask a member of our team to contact you.