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Audit season is in full swing, and finance teams everywhere are gathering the information they need for their auditors to do their job. With construction, this already time-intensive process is more complex, as multiple projects in various stages have large amounts of data to be sorted and categorized correctly.
What can make the busy audit season a streamlined process that benefits your company? In a word — automation. Read on to learn four ways automation can improve your audit.
1. Access to timely and accurate information
Having information on hand, knowing it is accurate and up to date, is a massive benefit not only for your audit but your company. In construction finance, so much of what we do is time-consuming and labor-intensive that data is generally passed through multiple hands and takes weeks (or months) to be reported.
By automating your manual processes, your business information will be collected, inputted, and shared across your systems immediately. Now, everyone who needs access to correct numbers has them in real time. Having your data automated and unified through one system means your finance team is ready to answer any questions an auditor or executive may have.
2. Format and gather information
One issue for construction is as many hands are doing the work — and data is entered manually through multiple systems — the consistency of the input may be an issue. Automation can solve that as the automation bots will replicate data over to your ERP or your PM system with a much smaller margin of error than a human.
During audit season, it can be frustrating for a company to have auditors camped out reviewing everything and requesting documentation — you want them in and out so you can get back to work. Having information readily available and formatted correctly to hand over minimizes questions and eliminates the back-and-forth, speeding up the audit process and ultimately streamlining your business.
3. Achieve monthly close
The holy grail of the monthly close can be achieved — even in construction. Currently, there is too much manual work, too many invoices to be dealt with, and a massive volume of information fed into your finance team to close the books every month. Automation can break the cycle. Thanks to automation bots that can run 24/7 and don’t get fatigued by inputting large amounts of data, your team can focus on bigger strategic goals while the automations ensure your teams have access to accurate, timely information as they need it. With automations, you don’t even need to wait until the end of the month.
4. A new and better way to work
Overall, automating your business means you need to examine how you work and reimagine how you could work. From there, you’ll need to build new processes to allow your business to utilize automation technology to its fullest extent. The automations need structure to take over the work, and by rebuilding your processes with a digital-first mindset, you’ll be transforming your business for the modern world.
Digitally transforming your business to be more efficient, accurate, and timely will make every corner of your business operate better not only for audit season, but it will help future-proof your business.
If you got this far, you must be interested in learning more about how automation can help your business operate better. Contact us here to arrange a demo and chat with our experts.
If you want to learn more about what auditors and CFOs think about financial automation, particularly around this busy season, check out our recent webinar here.
