Key takeaways
Finance & Accounting is a sensitive business function that traditionally relies on human intelligence and intuition. Today, Intelligent Automation has significantly alleviated and distributed the burden from this function’s sole shoulders to its ecosystem and augmented its decision-making process; however, much still depends on human intervention. With the advent of AI-driven autonomous solutions and business practices, the Finance & Accounting function tends to gain a lot, ensuring sustainable business growth.
Today, the Finance & Accounting function relies heavily on manual monitoring and risk management despite the Automation efforts. According to statistics, over 50% of B2B invoices are overdue in the USA, and nearly 25% of bankruptcies stem from late payments in Europe. Fragmented data, manual follow-ups, and biased credit decisions impede cash flow. Poor risk management techniques fail to weed out risky customers at the right time, leading to blocked orders and excessive credit to undeserving business entities, and bad debts at times.
Autonomous Finance & Accounting Platforms with the underlying AI algorithm frameworks offer end-to-end process automation along with AI-driven insights and forecasting. They are instrumental in detecting fraud and reducing the risk of stagnating cash flows early on. These autonomous platforms offer automated order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and record-to-report functions that seamlessly integrate with ERP systems.
Contemporary Finance & Accounting teams work with Excel spreadsheets and use accounting systems only for record updates and maintenance. As a result, the available data is always outdated without clear real-time visibility of business outcomes.
Overdue invoices also create blocks for future orders, thus derailing the production cycles and cash flows of the entire value chain. These broken paths to revenue realization collectively create backlogs that are challenging to resolve, resulting in delays, errors, slower cash flows, bad debts and, at times, bankruptcies.
The Autonomous Finance & Accounting Platform is where the processes are operated, and also overseen as guardians, by AI algorithms. Its architecture directly impacts the business’s self-awareness and risk management in real-time. Here, the financial operations are intelligent and self-optimizing. It is a paradigm that reshapes business models and increasingly generates value with each batch processing, through AI-led continuous self-evaluation and learning. Autonomous Finance & Accounting enables both big enterprises and small start-ups to quickly decipher trends, eliminate risk, and ensure constant cash flow for sustained growth.
Autonomous Finance & Accounting Platforms allow businesses to transform into a predictive business function rather than a reactive one. The underlying self-learning AI algorithms transform the P2P and O2C business functions into smart growth engines. The platforms work with real-time data and feedback loops to generate unified visibility across different Finance & Accounting functions. The smart engines being prepped with alert mechanisms initiate quick redressals addressing real-time credit and invoicing collections.
Autonomous Finance & Accounting Platforms are adept at intelligent execution, intelligent optimization, intelligent correction, real-time operations, and reduced human intervention. Here, human intervention shifts from tactical to strategic design and governance. The shift is from being just a human operator to the strategic role of an architect and a governing body.
Let us see some of the key characteristics of these platforms:
Some of the important Autonomous Finance & Accounting use cases are:
The major advantages of the Autonomous Finance & Accounting Platforms are:
Heavy reliance on manual monitoring of the Finance & Accounting functions creates process inefficiencies. Failures in process efficiencies and compliances accumulate into slower cash flows over time, and at times, irrecoverable bad debts. Autonomous Finance & Accounting Platforms enable business entities to automate end-to-end processes and weed out risky propositions at inception. The process autonomy brings in intelligence across the O2C, AP, and R2R functions that keep the cash flows streaming across the business value chain without active human intervention.