By: Lee Jacobs, Head of Product

The slow roll to digitally transforming the Office of the CFO will gain momentum in 2025. Here’s where to begin and how to demonstrate quick ROI.

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A sluggish economy marked by persistent inflation, ongoing global conflicts, and a contentious election cycle made for a challenging 2024. Many organizations chose to zero in on efficiency and maintain restricted spending while waiting out the market volatility. In this complicated environment, organizations relied on the Office of the CFO to drive financial strategy and for operational expertise.

While early economic indicators point to the possibility of better times ahead, the expectation for finance to do more with less will only continue in 2025. Financial automation will help teams deliver.

Unlock potential 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—an important benefit as stress and burnout rise across the industry and fewer students choose the accounting field for its low-tech, high-stress, slow-growth reputation. This makes hiring more difficult and exacerbates the requirement for finance to do more with less.

Most finance teams have made minimal progress in automating their workflows so far, despite its benefits. But that will shift in 2025.

No more status quo

CFOs have adopted digital transformation initiatives slowly despite their ability to elevate financial processes. The 2024 McKinsey & Company Global Survey of CFOs found that while most (79%) have digitized some processes in the past year, two-thirds of responding CFOs have automated fewer than half.

Digital transformation rates are low primarily for organizational reasons. Already demanding workloads for the finance team is the primary reason more progress hasn’t been made on automation, say 70% of CFOs. The Institute of Finance & Management (IOFM) 2024 Automation and Technology Benchmarking Report cites the time required to get the technology working properly as practitioners’ greatest concern over automating processes.

Start with AP for quick ROI

Digitally transforming your finance office is no easy task, but many organizations find automating accounts payable (AP) delivers fast, demonstrable ROI.

AP teams are critical members of the finance function. They play a leading role in managing organizational cash flow—particularly important in today’s inflationary environment—and maintaining strong vendor relationships. Their importance can’t be understated. Unfortunately, AP is also one area of finance overrun with traditionally manual processes that are tedious and inefficient.

High costs

The countless hours required to manually sort and process invoices make the effort costly. In the Metrics that Matter report, industry researchers Ardent Partners say the average cost of processing an invoice is $9.87 each, and it takes AP, on average, 10.1 days to process. Costs only rise when you factor in other common occurrences like failures to match invoices with POs, duplicated payments, invoices that require corrections, and discounts not taken advantage of due to missed deadlines.

Growing workloads

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. In a separate study from IFOL, 60% of respondents said they were only somewhat or not at all equipped to handle any increase in invoice volume – perpetuating the accountant’s stress level and increasing the likelihood of costly errors.

More finance teams are responding

Nearly half (45%) of respondents in the 2024 Accounts Payable Automation Trends Report from the Institute of Financial Operations & Leadership (IFOL) plan to fully automate the AP department in the next 12 months. Nearly three-fourths of IFOL respondents (71%) anticipate automation will speed up the payable process, and 60% believe it will increase controls and reduce risk.

Why? Because automating AP will help your team do more with less. Here’s a few examples:

• Easily onboard vendors with self-serve data collection forms
• Streamline invoice ingestion with AI-enabled invoice processing
• Run real-time 3-way match validations
• Approve transactions with dynamic workflows directly from a user’s inbox
• Securely send payments via ACH or check
• Accelerate the financial close process with automated expense accruals 

Whatever your business strategy next year, financial automation will be an important tool for ensuring your team can deliver more productivity with greater accuracy and control with less. To demonstrate the highest ROI quickly, start with AP.

SquareWorks Automate is here to help AP teams. With everything integrated directly into NetSuite, this tool boosts efficiency and visibility and allows finance teams to manage vendor relationships, speed up invoice processing, automate approvals, securely send payments, and even handle expense accruals—all from one platform. To learn more about this solution, contact us here.