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It’s said that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. However, in construction, there’s a third certainty: audit season. During this period of the year, construction finance teams are preparing to buckle down and dig through pages and pages of documentation. It’s often seen as a cumbersome disruption to regular business, and can even become adversarial as external auditors make increasing demands of your teams. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Although audit season has historically required a significant amount of labor to complete, that paradigm is starting to shift. Many industries enjoy a very smooth, almost painless auditing process with minimal deviation from business as usual. They’re achieving this by leveraging financial technology to assist in the auditing process. The right financial technology can organize your documents, connect your teams, and automate data entry so that all of your audit needs can be fulfilled in just a few clicks. Construction companies that learn how to use this technology will not only enjoy the same benefits but also see improvements in operational efficiency across the board. Let’s explore how construction companies can use technology to optimize their audit season.
Connect your silos
Silos are all too common in construction. While these silos may allow your departments to hone in on their specialties, they can also become barriers to efficiency when audit season rolls around. Your financial experts are already spending a great deal of time trying to reconcile accounts and validate financial statements. The silo adds another task on top of all of that, as your employees may spend hours trying to locate a document that another department has. To make matters worse, external auditors often won’t accept copies of a document. They may need the original version to ensure no alterations have been made. All of this adds to the financial maze that is audit season.
Automated workflows can help solve this problem for your business. These workflows take the burden off your team and make it easier to get tasks done. Instead of writing long email chains inquiring about timelines, source documents, and more, the workflows will notify the relevant parties when it’s time to submit something. Then, those submissions will get forwarded directly to the right accountant who can validate and approve the document. This means your staff no longer has to find the right person or hunt through their spam folder to make sure nothing was lost. Now, they have clear visibility into who has ownership over financial documents, and when they plan on submitting it all.
Centralize your financial data
Even with automated workflows in place, there are still hurdles to overcome. Knowing who has the data and getting it into the right hands is only half the battle. Your accounting team still has to store and organize all of that financial data coming in. That challenge only adds up as more and more documents come in. We’ve all been in the position of having accidentally closed an important tab or misplaced a file on a stack of papers. The constant worry and focus associated with organizing everything so that none of it gets lost adds to the mental load of the audit season.
It’s time to put an end to financial clutter by leveraging data clouds. Data clouds can store, sort, and analyze all of your vital financial documents on behalf of your teams. There’s no need to sort folder after folder on your desktop or export a third copy of a spreadsheet you thought you already had. The cloud allows your teams to store all of your key documentation in a single place for easy access. Best of all, these data clouds can even synchronize with your workflows, meaning your teams will never have to upload the same document twice. This puts an end to the detective work financial teams have to do to locate every last invoice. A simple search will give you access to what you need as soon as you need it.
Eliminate double data entry
One of the most challenging parts of audit accounting has nothing to do with analysis. There’s one simple, repetitive task that can give financial teams the most trouble. Your accounting team is likely spending hours and hours on double data entry, especially during audit season. Whether it’s copying over data from billing documents or extracting data from software with no Excel export option, there are far too many sources of double data entry in construction finance. Piles and piles of spreadsheets are often just redundancies for what already exists in another system. It makes you wish there was a way to just transport all of that data out of your documents and software, and into the right spreadsheet without any human input.
Fortunately, there is a way. Financial automation is here, and it’s finally in a format that works for the construction industry. The right financial automation tools can go into your software, copy the information that’s in there, and organize it into whatever preselected spreadsheet format you want. It can even scan invoices and instantly allocate costs to your budget accordingly. It’s the antidote to the double data entry that accountants dread when closing the books. Financial automation tools allow your teams to generate the reports they need fast, and extract information from wherever it’s located without the need for additional hours of labor.
Automate your audits
Financial technology is revolutionizing the way companies do business. It’s providing tools that can turn even the most challenging of audits into a seamless, optimized process. These tools can break down the complexity of construction finance and create a better way to work for everyone involved. That’s why we’ve built a platform that combines these tools with the construction industry's best practices. Briq unites construction finance with automation so that your business can audit with ease.
Briq is a financial automation platform built to help construction companies run a better business. Our platform helps businesses automate and optimize key financial processes to create better outcomes 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.
