How your finance team could get back the moments that matter
By Rob Steele, CFO, iplicit
It’s Friday and still daylight as you hit “Shut down” on your computer. You’re logging off with enough time and energy left to do something else.
Maybe that something else is a run or a game of tennis. Perhaps it’s spending time with a child or on caring responsibilities. Or maybe it’s taking time to choose wisely what you eat and watch, rather than consuming convenience food and whatever the streaming algorithm serves up.
For many people in finance and accounting, that kind of evening is still a fantasy. Their days are dominated by data entry and document processing – and they’re often still slogging through spreadsheets when the working day should be over.
I’ve been a founder, I’m now a CFO and I’ve been involved with finance software since Windows was new and shiny. When iplicit recently asked 250 finance leaders in mid-market organisations to name the main drains on their teams’ time, the top answers were the same as they might have been when I started out: data entry (cited by 42%), reconciliation of accounts and transactions (40%) and invoice processing (28%).
Going by those findings, it might seem my decades of urging people to modernise their systems and save time were a bit futile. But that’s not the case. Every day, I hear of finance teams that are improving their efficiency and enjoying more satisfying work – as well as finishing that work a bit earlier.
Some stories from the North West
Take one of iplicit’s best-known customers in the North West, Blackpool Grand Theatre. It ran its finances on an old-fashioned, on-premises system. To monitor the costs of individual productions, the theatre had “hundreds of spreadsheets all over the place”, according to Mark Preston, Head of Business and Finance. Staff laboriously checked incoming invoices against those spreadsheets and keyed in the invoice numbers.
A move to a modern, cloud-based system saved time and put people in control of their work. “We can be more productive now and can focus on doing the things that can really add value,” says Mark.
Wirral-based charity Autism Together had been grappling for a long time with a clunky finance system. (Actually it was the same system I co-founded when I was 18. It was a pretty exciting product in 1990 but the world has moved on.) Few tasks
could be automated, so producing consolidated accounts involved many hours in spreadsheets.
Automation changed that. “At the end of the month, there used to be 30 or so reports to compile in Excel. Now, it’s basically self-serve for the budget holders, so that has saved an incredible amount of time,” according to Louise Parnell, who was Director of Finance at the time of the change.
SIL – which stands for both Support, Inspire, Learn and School Improvement Liverpool – is a local authority trading company whose finance software was part of the city council’s corporate system. “Reporting our P&L to the board or shareholder used to take me two or three days,” says Karen Lea, Head of Finance. “I had a spreadsheet, including a tab with all my account codes, and I had to manually categorise everything.”
That changed with the move to iplicit. “If somebody says ‘Can I have an updated P&L?’, it takes me two seconds to refresh the data in my spreadsheet – instead of two to three days,” says Karen.
Adding AI to the mix
We’ve got this far without mentioning AI. All the time savings I’ve mentioned above were accomplished with the kind of automation iplicit has been building since before ChatGPT changed the world. That’s as it should be – because while AI can be a great time saver, you need to build an accurate, efficient system of record before you reap the full benefit.
A ledger is a “deterministic” system, where the same input always produces the same output. Once the data in that system is complete and current, you can start to harness AI tools such as those we’ve built in iplicit. Those tools can produce reports and analysis from your verified figures, with every output traceable to the ledger. The time savings from that can be enormous.
I’ve spent much of my career trying to give finance people their time back so they can enjoy life to the full. When you review your own systems and processes, I’d suggest asking not just “Is our system good enough?” but “What time does my team leave at night? And how much time and energy do people have left when the working week is over?”
I know that perfect Friday I described is possible because I’ve lived it. If your team is experiencing it too, it’s a sign you’re doing something right.
Click here for resources on unlocking time for your team.
