By: Lee Jacobs, Head of Product for SquareWorks Automate
Fewer students choose the accounting career path today thanks to long hours for low pay and tedious tasks. This makes hiring harder – but automation will help. Learn how finance teams are improving culture, increasing job satisfaction, and offering higher-value work opportunities with technology.
Accounting is known for long hours for low pay, slow career advancement, and limited opportunities to learn and benefit from innovative technology. Most finance teams today report feeling stressed, burnt out, and searching for solutions. This unforgiving reputation has also resulted in fewer students choosing the career path.
Lee Jacobs, Director of Product for SquareWorks Automate, understands the toll these challenges take on finance teams. Having worked closely with organizations navigating burnout, Lee advocates for automation as a practical solution to improve efficiency and create a more fulfilling workplace.
It’s a perfect storm for hiring managers – and the finance teams trying to do more with less. Fortunately, there are ways to break this cycle. One approach is automation.
Rising workloads
The role of finance continues to grow as organizations focus on profitability and efficiency through economic volatility. Emerging technologies are also changing the future of finance, powering new insights and forecasting that can help inform organizational decision-making. While today’s Office of the CFO continues to uphold traditional financial and regulatory requirements, leaders are also asked to formulate and drive strategy and provide operational expertise.
Meeting these lofty expectations with an overworked team amid a dwindling workforce isn’t ideal, but it is a reality. When there aren’t enough hours in the day for the finance team, strategic projects don’t get the attention they need, accuracy suffers, and job satisfaction plummets.
The finance industry has proposed several ideas for addressing the accountant talent shortage and overworked teams, including changes to education requirements, pay raises, and technology. Automation is one surefire way to make improvements, and organizations can start today.
Unlock efficiencies and reduce stress with automation
Automation helps overstretched finance teams speed up processes, increase efficiency, boost productivity, and improve accuracy. It frees them from otherwise manual, tedious, error-prone tasks and allows accounting teams more time for higher-value, strategic work. This can increase job satisfaction and reduce staff turnover. A 2024 study by consulting and staffing firm RGP found 43% of organizations are investing more in end-to-end automated accounting processes and AI tools to help alleviate the accounting shortage.
Start with AP for high ROI
While critical to an organization and the finance team, AP is also an area overrun with traditionally manual processes that are tedious and inefficient. The 2024 IOFL Accounts Payable Automation Trends Report identifies several process challenges common to AP teams. The top three are:
- 51% Too much manual data entry
- 48% Invoice exceptions
- 47% Data errors and discrepancies
In response to these process delays, the top core issue AP teams face is stress (63%). And according to a 2024 study by PYMNTS Magazine, AP workloads are only expected to grow. Nearly 80% of mid-size firms anticipate an increase in invoices they must process over the next three years.
Technology adoption has proven key to unlocking AP efficiencies, driving timely new insights, and relieving some of the stressful burdens finance teams feel today.
Improve culture
The chance to use innovation at work is a definite perk. Most finance team members view technology as an opportunity to augment their work and advance their careers. Historically, some accountants may have feared that technology would replace staff, but this number declines each year. Instead, it’s thought of as a career enabler and enhancer.
In the 2024 AFP FP&A Benchmarking Survey: People Strategies and Development, 78% of respondents said they are pursuing advancing their knowledge and skills in technology and data over the next 12 months. Unfortunately, not enough organizations are supporting the move – only 42% said they are covering some or all of the costs for new employee skill acquisition.
As organizations push for more automation in 2025, keep in mind staff training should also rise in priority. Training will fuel innovation and increase job satisfaction across the finance team.
As the industry works on sweeping changes to attract more students and retain top talent, organizations can do their part in addressing the talent shortage by automating tedious processes. The upside is a bigger, happier finance team with higher productivity, greater accuracy, and more controls.
Let the experts at SquareWorks Consulting help you automate your financial processes via the NetSuite-native financial automation platform Automate. Get started here.
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