Why Automate?

Manual processes, using email, spreadsheets and paper forms are passe. The disadvantages of the manual way of approving and making payments are:

• Overkill on approvals - For employee claims, it is difficult to ensure that the correct delegation matrix is adhered to ensure approvals and payment authorizations. As a result of which, it is entirely possible that only the CFO is signing every payment authorization, when even someone junior could have approved some payments.  

• Inadequate approvals - Or  vice versa, where an approval is made by a junior manager because the senior manager did not realize that for that expense code the authorization level was not adequate.  

• Answering Queries - If your organization has two hundred employees, for example, and each employee calls up atleast once in a month to enquire about her voucher status, it keeps your team busy searching for a paper form if it has already reached the Finance department. On the other hand, if the voucher has not reached the Finance dept., it is close to impossible to guide the employee as to where his voucher may be as of now.  

• Comparing - If you need to search out the mobile phone claims of ten people across branches for the past four months - imagine how difficult that is in the manual system. If this information was easily available you could have had a quicker assessment whether the current claim on your desk is appropriate or not.  

• Responding to Vendor - Vendors call up often to find out the status of their payments. Your organization representatives might not be able to answer the query meaningfully, or predict the time the payment might take. This creates an unprofessional image about the company.  

• Budget control - Budgets and tracking their utilization is difficult with spreadsheets alone - right from the time the expense is planned, to incurred and then paid, the cost centers and budget codes need to be tracked. Manually collating how much has been spent for a budget code is time consuming and hence is typically available only at the end of the month. By which time it is too late to control the expense.  

• The Black Box effect - How many CFOs actually work on their accounting system for MIS? Invariably accounting systems become repositories for vouchers and financial statements. Tracking expenses with a view to controlling, predicting or provisioning is not feasible by looking into the accounting system data.