Unleash digital capabilities with analytics, automation, and AI
Automation and AI analytics are making finance functions more effective, efficient and attractive to staff. Unleashing their capabilities starts with new skills, constant training and clear management.
Repetitive work and tedious administrative tasks can limit productivity and momentum in finance teams. Digital tools can automate workloads and supercharge decision-making by assessing enormous datasets in moments – giving finance teams the information and the freedom required to refocus on strategy and business partnering.
Skills and development
of CFOs agree that improving digital skills and knowledge would have a significant impact on the success of their business strategy.
- 79% would invest in improving their own (CFO) skills
- 78% would invest in improving their finance team's skills
- 82% would invest in improving the board's skills
Source: The Digital CFO Survey*
Without training, organisations cannot leverage new digital capabilities to their full potential, resulting in wasted investment and loss of competitive advantage.
Finance leaders are in a unique position to influence boards to prioritise investment in digital learning and development, as their role is critical to the organisation’s strategic investment choices.
Digital skills and learning
Three questions to get started
When evaluating which new skills are needed to support digital transformation, CFOs can consider three areas:
- Operation – the skills needed to run and maintain new finance function automation.
- Continuation – the capability to continue to develop and improve systems, by adopting, suggesting and developing new functionality.
- Innovation – the ability to horizon scan for emerging technology that can transform finance operations.
CFOs and their board colleagues need critical thinking skills to evaluate the inherent risks and benefits of fast-emerging new technology. The learning goal is not necessarily deep technical knowledge, but the ability to identify and clearly articulate business requirements to experts. As guardians of their organisation’s financial security, they also need the knowledge to challenge the risk profile of proposed solutions.
Automated systems still need human input. Team members at all levels should be trained on how to use, develop and improve new technology (operation and continuous improvement skills). Key learning areas include how to make decisions using data, question anomalies, and adapt in step with emerging technology.
Automation
Finance leaders name the top benefits of automation
Improve productivity and scalability
Improve process efficiency
Enhance decision making
Source: The Digital CFO Survey*
Improve controls and compliance
Why automate?
Automation isn’t a new concept in finance – we’ve been automating financial processes for over a century with punch-card machines and early calculators. Modern financial markets exist only because of a multitude of automated processes. However, in the context of rapidly developing AI, there is a renewed focus on new capabilities of automation.
From a business perspective, automation can help organisations drive efficiencies, improve compliance, keep a lid on costs, and react quickly to market changes. Finance departments, where the majority of work is spreadsheet-based, are well-positioned to benefit from automation.
Productivity, efficiency, decision-making and enhanced control were ranked as the most significant benefits by finance leaders in our recent survey – but employee satisfaction, retention, and attraction are often overlooked benefits of automation. Technology reduces the drudge work of outdated manual processes, giving finance teams more time to focus on value-added tasks, such as strategy and business partnering.
Finance teams join organisations to focus on these areas, but an administrative and repetitive workload can eat into the time available for these longer-term, value-add projects, resulting in demotivated finance teams and reduced job satisfaction. Here, automation can be an incredible enabler – not just of the efficiency required, but of the subsequent uplift in team morale.
Other benefits of financial process automation can include:
- Efficiency and accuracy: Automation not only saves time by executing tasks faster but should also help complete tasks correctly the first time, eliminating human error and the need for corrections.
- Cost savings: With pressure on margins and profit lines, finance teams can wield automation to increase their output and drive growth. Instead of inflating team sizes to match workload, repetitive processes can instead be automated, allowing for your current team to achieve more within their existing roles. This is particularly relevant for businesses following post-Budget increases to employer National Insurance Contributions and the National Minimum Wage.
- Making best-informed decisions: Automation speeds up processes, providing faster access to better quality data and enabling quicker decision-making. The level of autonomy for automated decision-making is controllable, allowing for delegation of low-risk decisions to automated tools, and fast summaries of large datasets for higher-risk decisions requiring human input.
Quick automation wins
The good news is that these gains can be made without system-level investment. Some common, quick, and low-code solutions include:
- Flushing through new exchange rates – automating the process of updating exchange rates can save time and ensure accuracy, making the data ready for use at the start of each day rather than waiting for a manual update.
- Clearing shared inboxes – Automating the allocation of emails in shared inboxes (such as credit control queries or purchase order requests) to the appropriate team members can streamline workflows.
- Rolling forwards of pro forma – Automating repetitive tasks like rolling forward management accounts packs, board packs, or sets of statistics can save significant time and reduce manual effort.
Finance function automation
Three questions to get started
The CFOs who have the most success are those who encourage and empower their teams to identify automation opportunities. This reinforces the need for skills and training to unleash digital capabilities.
A common error is to start with the technology first. A more efficient approach is to identify specific problems without initially worrying about how to fix them. This gives CFOs the scope to choose the right solution and avoid spending on unnecessary capabilities.
Tasks that involve manual data entry are often time-consuming, prone to errors, and are the most detrimental to staff morale – making them ideal candidates for automation.
A good start is to identify repetitive actions – any processes that involve repeated downloads, lots of copying and pasting, or large datasets, are prime for automation.
AI Analytics
In addition to automating repetitive and manual processes, (increasingly AI-driven) technology can supercharge the analytical capabilities of a finance team.
Digital analytics gives CFOs a better understanding of why certain events occur and offers insight into risk and key performance indicators, which are crucial for understanding changes in the business.
Where can AI and analytics help?
- Budgeting and forecasting: Predictive analytics can model future financial scenarios and make informed budgeting decisions.
- Expense management: Automatic tracking and categorisation of expenses identifies trends and highlights areas for cost reduction.
- Cash flow management: Monitoring and analysing cash flow in real-time helps to maintain liquidity and optimise financial planning.
- Fraud detection: Identifying unusual patterns or anomalies in financial transactions can indicate fraudulent activity.
- Compliance monitoring: Ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements by automating compliance checks and generating necessary reports.
- Investment analysis: Evaluating potential investments by analysing historical and real-time data to inform decision-making.
Finance function analytics
Three questions to get started
To avoid getting lost in swathes of organisational data, finance teams must clearly define the purpose of analytics software: what answers do you need to drive the business forward or solve a particular problem? Beyond specific questions, AI can help finance teams quickly understand broader patterns of change in key risk and key performance indicators. For example, why has brand sentiment suddenly dropped or profit spiked?
Traditional methods of data analysis can be slow, leading to outdated information that hinders timely decision-making. There is often only time to focus on surface-level data (e.g., numbers going up or down) without deeper insights into what is driving them. In these cases, analytics tools may be the answer, finding unseen trends in performance data and matching them to unexpected results.
As demonstrated by the many examples of AI stubbornly getting facts wrong or ‘hallucinating’, the technology is far from perfect. Finance teams need the skills and training to rigorously test outputs and challenge results.
Moving towards a digital-first mindset
Automation, AI, and analytics – together with the relevant supporting skills in place – can empower finance teams to reap the benefits of digital transformation. To ensure success, CFOs must always place people at the heart of any automated or analytical process – whether through upskilling or direct responsibility over the implementation of tech solutions. The next challenge for CFOs is to ensure this is always an ongoing, evolving process.
*The Digital CFO Survey is an anonymous questionnaire for 300 CFOs at businesses with £50 million-£1 billion annual revenue (mid-market) and 200 CFOs/GFCs at businesses with more than £1 billion annual revenue (large corporates). The data was obtained in June 2024.
All respondents come from UK-based businesses across a range of sectors and regions.
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