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Audit season is notoriously rigorous for the financial department. They spend months accumulating, verifying, and analyzing financial documentation to ensure everything is ready for the next year. It’s not just a necessary part of the business, it’s also an exhausting one. Financial teams are already trying to clear out a significant backlog of project data, forecasts, invoices, and billing information. Audit season adds to that burden and exponentially increases the effort your team has to go through during this season. This presents an annual challenge to construction finance teams, as they balance regular business with seasonal demands. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.
The last decade has inundated the financial sector with technology that’s revolutionizing the way businesses handle their finances. The right financial technology can help your team get through the audit season painlessly. Performing financial compliance without these tools is actually perceived as outdated in many other industries. Instead, financial professionals should only step in to confirm what’s already been validated, handle financial analysis, check in on any detected discrepancies, or initiate an automated process.
Historically, the construction industry hasn’t received the same benefits. Due to the unique nature of construction finance, it’s difficult to create a one size fits all tool. For all intents and purposes, it’s always been easier to do the work by hand than risk using technology that causes more problems than it solves. Luckily, that isn’t the case anymore. Thanks to customized financial automation, construction companies can now smoothly integrate these tools into their auditing process. Let’s go over how technology can help you enhance your audit season.
Automate repetitive tasks
If you ask anybody in construction finance for a piece of data, they’re almost certain to use a spreadsheet to show it. Everyone in the back office knows Excel like the back of their hand. But that also means they’re all too familiar with its downsides. From billing documents to ERPs, there’s a seemingly inexhaustible number of data sources that your financial team is required to manually copy data from when completing an audit. On top of that, since most documentation isn’t centered in one place, there’s often duplicate documentation created from scratch by two different employees. No matter what angle you look at it from, the facts are always the same. Repetitive data entry is one of the biggest challenges that any construction finance team has to contend with to get an audit done.
Your accountants don’t need to lose hours to repetitive data entry. Instead, construction companies can rely on financial automation to move their data for them. Financial automation tools can retrieve your data from wherever it’s located and organize it for you. It can extract information from your ERP, your CRM, digital receipts, invoices, and even individual line item transactions. This means that no matter how complicated your audit might seem, you won’t need to copy over any information from an external source. The automation tools will extract whatever you want and format it as needed. With financial automation, your teams won’t need to enter any information more than once. Instead, they’re free to focus on analyzing and organizing all your other audit needs in a timely, efficient manner without the burden of double data entry.
Identify discrepancies
Ending double data entry takes off a great deal of the burden of audit season. However, any thorough audit involves far more than just data entry. From complex tax legalese to questions about individual cost codes, auditors comb over every aspect of your construction company's finances to make sure everything is running smoothly. The questions can get increasingly specific as your accounting team gets pushed from one financial goose chase into another to find the stray bank statement that’s offsetting the final balance sheet.
Your financial department knows your business best. However, their greatest asset is their knowledge and analytical skills. That asset isn’t being used when they’re spending hours combing over invoices and payroll records to locate a single set of digits for reconciliation. However, that’s exactly what data analytics tools are designed to do.
Data analytics tools can be your company's secret weapon during the audit season. Analytics tools can comb over all of your documentation and identify discrepancies fast. For example, if advertising costs have increased by 20% this year, an analytics tool can detect that fact, flag it, and show you exactly what costs caused the differences between this year and the previous one. There’s no need to spend hours comparing every receipt from last year to this year when trying to locate the source of additional costs. Now, data analytics can do the searching for you and act as both your auditor's and your accounting team's best ally. Let data analytics do the auditing for you.
A platform for all of your financial data
Although the benefits we’ve outlined here can help your business, it’s still only the tip of the iceberg. From verifying your accountant's spreadsheets against the data in your systems to fully automating your WIP, the right financial platform can do more than automate your audit. It can also provide key business insights, centralize your financial data, and build a better way to work for your construction company. It’s time to say goodbye to paper and pen, and say hello to Briq instead.
Briq is a financial automation platform built to help construction companies run a better business. Our platform offers all of the benefits we’ve listed here and more. We’ve achieved this by merging decades of construction expertise with modern technology to create a true financial solution for the industry. Briq helps construction companies analyze and improve their financial processes at every level. If you’d like to learn more about what Briq can achieve for your business, speak with our experts and get a live Briq demo at briq.com/demo.
