As a finance professional, you’re used to tackling numerous finance-related admin tasks on a daily basis. But what if there was a tool that could eliminate most of these mundane jobs, leaving you with more time to do the finance work that matters?
That tool is technology, but unfortunately, many financial professionals are resistant to the change that new tech can bring. After all, for years now, finance people worldwide have been doing the painstaking manual tasks of collecting data and creating reports to distribute to the people who need this information. It’s a process that works, more or less. So why change it?
When it comes to new technology, however, change is a good thing, particularly for your finance team. In this article, we discuss the many benefits tech offers finance professionals, and provide a roadmap to guide you through some of the obstacles you might encounter as you navigate the world of tech.
How technology benefits finance teams
Digital transformation is more than a trendy buzzword these days: the global digital transformation market is set to grow from 521.5 billion USD in 2021 to a whopping 1,247.5 billion in 2025. For finance professionals working in the media industry, this drive toward digital transformation means there’s no better time than the present to step up and embrace new tech. And an innovative product like Lineup System’s Adpoint Finance has a lot to offer the finance world. Let’s explore 3 key benefits.
- Greater efficiency
Not too surprisingly, over 75% of respondents surveyed for a joint report by the Institute of Management Accountants and Deloitte reported that their company’s accounting processes continue to be largely manual, or require considerable manual effort. Implementing new technological processes to replace these legacy systems will have a significant impact on efficiency by reducing the amount of manual work required.
- Innovation advantage
As a tech company, Lineup stands out from much of the industry because many of our key people come from non-tech backgrounds. Our recruitment strategy means former finance professionals are an integral part of our team, and this provides you with a major benefit: our key players understand the challenges finance professionals experience. This in-depth professional knowledge allows us to develop and continuously innovate products that directly address the issues finance professionals face on a day to day basis.
- Media industry experience
For finance professionals working within the media industry, Lineup’s tech solutions offer another big plus. Our experience working with media company clients means we’ve seen the wide range of tech problems publishers face along with the solutions that work. This means our tech pros are ideally positioned to tell you what’s worked for other companies facing challenges similar to the ones you’re currently dealing with.
A tech roadmap for finance pros
Knowing you need to embrace new technology is one thing, but actually making the move toward implementing and using new tech often comes with its own set of challenges. The following roadmap guides you through the obstacles you may face during the tech adoption process.
Thoroughly test the demo
Familiarize yourself with new tech by going beyond made-up numbers when playing with the demo. Instead, get in deep by replicating your everyday workflows. You can do this by inputting real data from real clients—for example, practice processing your month-end invoicing using actual data—so you can get a true feeling for how the technology will work for you in real time.
Testing the demo in this way ensures you fully understand how everything works. The key is to reflect your real processes and transactions in the demo as much as possible. By doing this, you’ll be less likely to encounter difficulties when you go live with the product, because you’ve already tested the system with the kind of scenarios you encounter in your day-to-day work environment.
Be open to change
Implementing new systems requires you to question current processes to see if they’re still relevant. Finance teams are often wedded to old processes—in some situations, this could even mean technology and processes from 20 years ago.
You may be wondering how to use new tech to replicate some of your current processes. But it’s important to move beyond that kind of thinking. The key is to look beyond the process you’re currently using, and understand what you’re trying to achieve with a particular task. If a process is no longer necessary, your new tech is there to help you change to a better way of doing things.
Communicate effectively
Communicating to your finance team why the move to the new system is being made can be crucial to successful implementation and adoption. We’ve discussed the benefits of new tech above, but effective communication means more than simply focusing on these benefits.
A new system generates efficiency by eliminating the tedious tasks that occupy your finance team’s time, such as pulling numbers from different spreadsheets to come up with the figures necessary for the report they’re creating. This greater efficiency can create worry about job security. Address this anxiety by emphasizing that the efficiencies created ultimately free up your team’s time so they can focus on tasks that add more value to the company.
Be aware of culture shock
Surprisingly enough, the real challenge in the digital transformation process lies in tech’s ability to eliminate the manual processes your finance team is used to carrying out. As we discussed above, doing away with these tedious tasks creates greater efficiency, leaving your finance team with more time to do the jobs that matter.
But freeing up time can also create a kind of culture shock. When you no longer need to put in two hours of your time to run a report, because you have efficient tech to do the task for you, you may find yourself needing to adapt to having more time. Freeing up time often requires you to make the mindset shift to providing more value-added analytics or insights, and this can take time to get used to.
How the finance and tech worlds come together
Finance professionals tend to be reliant on their spreadsheets, which can often lead to resistance when moving away from the tried and true. However, this doesn’t mean the finance and tech worlds are incompatible. In reality, the two worlds are easily aligned. For example, finance professionals tend to be analytical and data driven. And the beauty of technology is that it easily and efficiently puts the data a finance pro needs right at their fingertips.
By using new technological processes, your finance team will be able to drill deeper and deeper into the data. This opens them up to the insights that let them act on the data rather than spending their time trying to pull that data together in the first place. Ultimately, there’s a synergy when finance and tech come together that provides you with both the time and the ability to make the value-added decisions that your legacy systems simply can’t support.
Transform your finance processes with Adpoint Finance
You and your finance team can’t afford to stick with old legacy processes. Let Adpoint Finance manage the more tedious finance tasks of billing, collecting, and reporting, all while providing you with the data you need to focus on the analytics and insights that add value to your company.
