Controllers Council recently held a webinar on The State of Automation in Finance: 2nd Edition, sponsored by Yooz.
Yooz is a cloud-based procure to pay or P2P automation, infusing intelligence into the accounts payable process.
Our expert speaker and panelist Casey Dial, head of sales, Western region at Yooz North America, an accomplished sales executive with over 11 years experience. He leads with industry expertise and charismatic nature, which have greatly contributed to his success. Casey studied business management and accounting at the University of North Texas and now resides in Mansfield, Texas with his wife and three kids and two large dogs.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webinar archive video here.
Top AP Priorities in 2022
The trends have been changing. As companies being to emerge into this new post-pandemic, we will see how their focuses have begun to change. As you can see from the day-to-day financial operations and that bullet four, it really is slid down as a priority as we move into 2022. This is a big hurdle that needs to be overcome by the uptick in attracting and retaining the right talent.
We have a lot more work from home practices, which, of course, has an increased in the cybersecurity practices, as well. As people start becoming remote and digital ages are starting to communicate back and forth in technologies, you’re going to have that heightened security risk.
73% of the financial leaders were just concerned about that new talent, 36% people having the necessary skill not only to adapt the work from home environment that’s traditional in office, but then also just with that larger demand, wage increases. I would say competition and market is going to be big because now that everybody’s working from home, it’s technically like you’re working from anywhere.
The current state of purchase-to-pay, accounts payable, and digital payment processes
Only 10% of those who have been fully automated are out there and they’re starting to embrace and focus on to start bringing that full automation to term for them. So, as you can see there’s a distant company that are inside of their AP automation journey that have not fully developed that full purchase to pay system yet. Only up to 15% are still actually running off Excel… I know that 14% have achieved to some degree of automation through electronic document management or EDM and that’s really kind of the first step into going digital as they say, it’s not really automation but it is a step towards digitizing your paper workforce.
The trends are going to continue to sway into technology and work from home.
The Cyber CFO
I think technology is a huge piece of that because with technology you can really start getting into more of a gamification or an entertainment into the mundane day to day processes that you may come up against.
And what’s great about getting into a technology that already has some of that security threshold taken care of for you is you’re hitting two birds of one stone. You’re getting more secure technology put in place, more secure processes put in place, but alongside of it you’re going to be increasing your employee morale. You’re going to be creating things that they’re going to be happy to come to work.
But one thing that’s always held true throughout all the years is the integration with the accounting softwares and ERP. They want to make sure it’s precise and clean because if you get into a situation where you have a tool and technology that makes your processing time much quicker and easier, but then it doesn’t connect with that ERP or accounting system, well then, you’re back to manual processes of figuring out what went wrong.
To view the complete webcast panel discussion, link to the video archive here.
ABOUT THE SPONSOR:
Yooz provides the smartest, most powerful, and easiest-to-use cloud-based Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) automation solution. It delivers unmatched savings, speed, and security with affordable zero-risk subscriptions to more than 4,000 customers and 200,000 users worldwide. Yooz’s unique solution leverages Artificial Intelligence and RPA technologies to deliver an amazing level of automation with extreme simplicity, traceability, and end-to-end customizable features. It integrates seamlessly with more than 250 financial systems, exceeding any other solution on the market.
