This article originally appeared in the October 2015 edition of Footnote, the member magazine of the Minnesota Society of CPAs and is republished with permission.
How workflow automation can help you
An unsigned purchase requisition form lying on your desk. A purchase order attributed to the wrong department. A petty cash request that stays in a folder for weeks waiting to be approved. A reimbursement claim with coffee-stained receipts and 20 pages of emails dating back to 2010.
Is your blood boiling yet?
CPAs are hardwired to believe in the power of the process. Four-plus years of auditing, tax and accounting courses drill down the tried-and-true path toward order and accountability. After all, no one sends in their tax details and says, “Make something original.”
But sometimes, the way you seamlessly navigate through your own spreadsheets doesn’t translate to the rest of the business world. You see the potential for streamlining a process, but consistently encounter resistance, apathy or ineptitude. You are surrounded by cabinets full of paper forms that you would love to eliminate, but you can’t seem to find the right solution that fits your budget and needs.
What can CPAs do to see the smooth flow of work spread throughout their business processes? Are you simply at the mercy of an unorganized world, or do you have any options to stand up and create some order?
What is a workflow?
A workflow is a predictable and repetitive sequence of business operations that travel from initiation to completion. Take a simple vacation request from an employee. It takes the same route every time: someone requests it, a manager approves or rejects it and the information is passed on to HR for recording. Identifying these repeated sequences is key to finding the order you desperately need.
What does it mean to automate a workflow?
In a regular business workflow, either one person is responsible for seeing it through from initiation to completion, or the ownership is passed around like a hot potato. The former is tiresome and not scalable, and the latter is the main reason things fall through the cracks and workflows don’t reach completion.
When you automate a workflow, the process owner maps out the entire process in a workflow management system. The software is responsible for ensuring the process keeps moving.
Let’s look at a purchase requisition for example. Someone wants to buy a new copy machine and initiates the request. At your organization, purchases at this level require approval from the office manager, the VP of operations and the CFO. The original initiator must also list three quotes from vendors.
Within a workflow management system, you would linearly diagram this process and create an electronic form for the initiator to complete. You could add a pre-filled table to the form to account for the different vendors’ quotes.
Once the form is submitted, it triggers the start of your workflow. An email is sent to the office manager. He or she looks over the details, examines the specifications of the machine and then approves or rejects the request.
If the request is approved, another email is automatically sent to the VP of operations who determines if it is a necessary expense. Upon his or her approval, the process then flows to the CFO who checks the current cash flow. If everything checks out, the request is approved and it is sent to purchasing.
In this process, no one needs to remember who these requests go to — the software automatically takes the workflow from step to step without any need for intervention. The entire process is handled, recorded and captured electronically.
What are the other benefits of automated workflows?
Aside from creating a scalable way to see workflows completed, automation has many other benefits.
- Eliminates paper forms. Paper forms easily get lost, are often filled out incorrectly and create a lot of storage issues. Electronic forms are much simpler to complete, and they leave a data trail that you can easily access later.
- Reduces email clutter. If you could take all the routine approvals out of inboxes, you would lighten everyone’s loads. Email approvals can get sloppy, generating long trails of conversations that don’t simplify the process.
- Generates data. Once you start automating your workflows, you can collect data on how long each process takes, the common bottlenecks, and who is performing at a high level. This information can be used to adjust workflows as needed and gives you a better overview of how your organization functions.
- Streamlines communication. Within each workflow, you can capture an individual’s comments. So when you need to go back and review a particular reimbursement claim, you can see the conversation as to why a hula hoop was approved.
- Minimizes costs due to errors. Late payments, slow sales approvals and payments for goods never received all become very expensive errors. An automated business process can give a business owner a quick look at the status of every claim to make sure careless mistakes don’t take place.
What else can be automated?
In the accounting world, CPAs use workflow automation for procurement requests, vendor onboarding, purchase orders, basic bookkeeping, expense claims, check requests, budget approvals and capital expenditure approvals. Anything that is repetitive and requires two or more approvals is a great candidate for automation.
Outside of accounting, many small-business owners use workflow automation for HR functions like employee onboarding or leave requests, resolving customer service complaints, lead management for sales and content creation for marketing. If you are a sole practitioner, you can use workflow automation to create an entire flow from the moment someone walks into your office to the personal thank-you note you send them after their payment is received.
We would all love our world to have a little more order than it does. Workflow automation is one simple step away from chaos and toward efficiency. Say goodbye to crumpled-up receipts and take the initiative to bringing order to your world. It’s what you were made to do.
Learn more at https://kissflow.com.