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The oil and gas industry boasts some of the most advanced engineering and technology of any industry. From hydraulic fracturing to seismic mapping, the field of extraction grows and improves with every year that passes. Despite all of this innovation, there’s an area of the industry that remains chronically underdeveloped and outdated. While field operations use advanced technology, the financial teams are working with the equivalent of shovels and pickaxes.
The oil and gas industry has a wealth of data to process. From dealing with hundreds of invoices to complex financial reports, it’s a miracle that accounting departments manage to get it all done in a timely fashion. However, timely doesn’t always mean cost-effective. There are huge benefits to operational efficiency, speed, and profit being left on the table by the industry as a whole. Financial automation can unlock the potential of your accounting department and open new roads to business development. Let’s go over what financial automation is and how it can play a key role in improving the oil and gas industry.
What is financial automation and why does it matter?
Financial automation is the use of technologies such as AI, data analytics, and robotic process automation to complete labor-intensive financial tasks. It’s a large umbrella that includes many different technologies under it. For example, financial automation can allow you to instantly generate an expense report from a spreadsheet or fully automate an oil well production forecast. The core idea behind financial automation is to allow bots to complete mundane, repetitive tasks and free up your employees for more value-added tasks.
In the oil and gas industry, accounting teams are responsible for handling a large amount of data and completing a variety of tasks on a regular basis. They’re moving critical operational and financial data between siloed software used by the engineering teams and the accounting teams. By leveraging financial automation, these teams can significantly improve their efficiency and accuracy, leading to better overall performance and cost savings for the company. Let’s explore some of the ways your business can apply financial automation within its own accounting teams.
Optimize your data entry process
Finance runs on data. Whether it's payments or billings, there are numbers to record at every corner. This can lead to accounting teams spending hours and hours typing in the same data from one document into another. Not only is this an inefficient use of time, but it can also increase employee burnout, lower morale, and negatively impact your turnover rate.
Financial automation can help your business turn this paradigm on its head. It specializes in handling large amounts of data quickly and accurately. Financial automation tools can take care of your complex financial transactions and ensure that all information is recorded in an accurate and timely manner. This reduces the potential for errors, improves overall efficiency, and alleviates the burden on your accounting teams.
Automate complex reports
While data entry alone is a huge win for your finance team, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Between well production forecast data, actual well production data, and the cost of drilling and production, oil and gas companies have to spend a significant amount of time building an accurate picture of how their operations are performing financially. That time can delay important business decisions and cost your business profit in the long run.
Luckily, financial automation can do more than just mundane data entry. It excels at automating complex processes. Simply provide your financial software with the correct models, and you’ll be able to instantly create whatever forecasts, reports, or analyses you need. Financial automation can achieve this by connecting to all of your applications and siloed software, uniting your data no matter where you have it. So long as the data exists, financial automation tools can find a way to access it. This allows your company to have a steady flow of accurate, timely data to stay strategically informed and make the best business decisions.
Do more with less
When your business scales up, it may need to hire multiple employees to help with the added amount of routine tasks. However, financial automation can eliminate this need by empowering your current employees. Since data entry and repetitive tasks are being taken care of by automation, a small team can achieve far more than they could before. This can lead to significant savings for the company, which can be reinvested in other areas of the business. It is important, however, to mention that automation is generally meant to help scale growth and empower existing employees, not replace them. It’s the difference between using a handheld screwdriver and an electric screwdriver. It doesn’t replace the person, but rather allows them to do more.
Invest in a financial automation platform
The benefits are clear, and so is the next step. The oil and gas industry needs to give the same attention to evolving the back office that it does to improving the field. This investment won’t just improve the quality of work for your employees, but it will also enhance profitability, efficiency, and financial visibility. However, the depth and complexity of these tools can make it hard to find the right partner. Companies looking to embrace financial automation can look to Briq as their ally.
Briq is a financial automation platform built to help companies run better businesses. We specialize in bringing financial automation technology to unique markets and addressing their complex needs with custom solutions. Our platform helps 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.
