Best practice in start-ups, digitising processes
In the first part of this article we told you about the misadventures of Marc, the CFO of a small organisation ‘condemned’ to digitise his function and develop his processes. The aim was to adapt to an increasingly competitive world and the specificities of the start-up world. Here's a summary of best practices for digitising your processes and helping you to stay the course. Particularly when you have to be the Director of Administration, Finance, Legal Affairs and Human Resources (and sometimes even the Head of Office Supplies).
What exactly do we mean by ‘digitalisation’?
The digitalisation of the company involves the implementation of specialised technological solutions (but between which there are often connections). Their aim is to transform practices and improve business performance. In fact, using the right tool can, at best, produce a more satisfactory result than before (increasing the degree of analysis, reducing the margin of error in forecasts, etc.) and, at worst, save precious time in carrying out tasks.
Here are our best practices in terms of digitising processes:
Document dematerialisation
When we talk about digitisation, the first thing that often comes to mind is the transition from paper to digital, and therefore from paper to digital dematerialisation.
This is the heart of accounting. Although this dematerialisation is broader than simply processing invoices and includes an entire EDM (electronic document management) process. Best practice in terms of dematerialisation is based on the combination of three technologies for an overall dematerialisation process:
- Optical character recognition (OCR),
- Automatic document recognition (ADR),
- Automatic document reading (ADR).
These technologies work together and are often grouped together in the same tool, such as the dedicated module in the Adobe suite. It's up to you to put in place the synergies for example, to feed directly into your CRM or accounting software. Solutions such as those from DIMO Software or Symtrax allow you to digitise, process, archive and integrate with your workflows most of your key documents. And since we are talking about workflows, we are also securing part of the company's processes. Digitisation thus strengthens internal control.
Collaborative working and feedback
Information feedback is also at the heart of digitisation. The task sharing in the accounts or budget closing process provides a permanent overview of progress and delays.
Whatever the size of the company, it is crucial to have a collaborative working appropriate tool. For example, centralising the exchange of documents in a dedicated tool enables you to manage ‘the versioning ‘. In other words, to allow successive revisions of documents by several collaborators without loss of information and with an audit trail. De facto, this avoids the multiplication of ‘v1’, ‘v2’ files... Also, thistask-sharing gives responsibility to the people involved in a chain, since each task is associated with a contact person and a schedule. The tools most commonly used include Asana, Slack and Trello.
Electronic signature
As part of this move towards paperless processes, electronic signature software is fast becoming essential. There are several types, including Concord or Verisign.
They make it easy to have a digital/digitised invoice or contract. Without an electronic signature solution, it's impossible to avoid printing. Another advantage of these tools is that they can significantly reduce the time taken to process many files/invoices requiring the signature of employees who are sometimes on the move. Reducing this time means the final cost invoice processing. And it allows each party to concentrate more on its core business rather than on administrative management.
The digitalisation of processes is not just administrative, but also financial:
Expense account management
In medium-sized organisations, the CFO is likely to be the first person recruited for the ‘future’ finance department. As such, he or she is also responsible for managing expense accounts. DAF Mag published a testimonial on its website fromExpensyathe developer of a solution that lets you manage your expense claims directly on your mobile phone. Using the application, your employees create the expense claim in the application by taking a photo of the receipt. The app then transfers the receipt to you automatically. What's more, the invoices stored in the Cloud can be organised for different departments. For example, this enables teams to be made aware of the savings that can be made and to disseminate information on the use of energy cash culture within the company.
Other solutions, such as Mooncard offer to link an application similar to Expensya's with a credit card. This will automatically fill in :
- a certain amount of information about the expense,
- cap the amount of expenditure.
In this way we saves time in the processing of expenditure.
Invoice processing
Regulations on digital invoicing have become much more flexible, and if you are responsible for digitising invoices, you now need to be able to process them automatically. This is where dedicated solutions such as Esker or Yooz.
They offer to digitise all or part of their customers processes ' Order to Cash ‘and Suppliers’ Purchase to Pay ‘. Then they include a validation workflow, which is also dematerialised. The productivity gains are quickly measurable. And they will be all the more appreciable as your business grows. If invoice flow are easily managed in the early stages, it is essential to plan ahead to control the volume to be treated over the long term without being overwhelmed, and to control the cost of treatment.
And what about cash management?
Beyond the ‘administrative’ side, the real challenge of digitisation is clear: to enable the CFO to reconcile accounting and management data more quickly. The ultimate aim is to be able to make decisions without wasting time processing the information it receives.
Data is now reconciled and processed almost automatically. Software for Business Intelligence (BI)/Data Visualisation are capable of transforming a stream of data into high value-added graphics. In some cases, this software transforms the data directly into reports that can be customised to your requirements. Unfortunately, too many CFOs still use EXCEL spreadsheets to produce their reporting. This is unthinkable when you know that 88% of Excel sheets contain errors ! Of course, in the interests of impartiality, we won't be recommending any particular tool, nor will we be talking about CashLab. CashLab is the tool that combines long-term cash flow forecasts and essential reporting elements...
After reading this article, where should you start to digitise your processes?
Closely monitor your cash flow in a clear and optimised manner with our Cashlab tool.