It’s needless to say that finance and accounting are key role players for business growth and strategy, but very often most organisations don’t truly understand all the processes finance teams are challenged with and how inefficiencies in their workflow limits their potential and contribution for the company. Managing main tasks such as invoicing and tracking expenses used to be a hassle, but with project management and collaboration tools such as MORNINGMATE, these tasks can be managed easily, not only by keeping record and reducing inefficiencies, but also giving your finance team more time to fulfill other useful and resourceful functions for the business.

In today’s competitive market, it is vital for organisations to keep themselves up to date with new technologies and ways to improve their workflow by investing and focusing their efforts and resources in optimising and streamlining processes for long-term sustainability. In this article, we will go through:

1. What are some common finance and accounting process challenges
2. What is finance process management
3. 5 Tips to improve finance operations processes
4. How project management tools help streamline your workflow

What are some common finance and accounting process challenges?

Before we define what is finance process management, it’s important to understand and identify some of the common struggles finance and accounting teams usually face in their day to day:

• Inefficient / outdated processes and tools: A lot of teams today are still stuck in the old ways of pencil and paper or multiple emails and spreadsheet keeping. It does get the job done, but with better tools, it could help your team be more productive.
• Unclear roles and responsibilities: Sometimes team members get confused on who is in charge of a certain processes or tasks, specially when certain work scopes are overlapped or shared between team members.
• Losing track of data and important files: The most common struggle of almost every team of any department is keeping record and track of all the data, conversations, and important files that tend to get lost in the piles of emails and various storage drives.
• Having slow approval processes: With all the work that the team gets slammed with on the regular, sometimes keeping up or tracking approvals can get delayed as they get lost in the various tasks and requests being received. 
• Lack of transparency and visibility: One of the most delicate challenges finance and accounting teams face is trust, not only between the worker and the organisation, but also between employees themselves as well.

What is finance process management?

Now that you have a better grasp on what are some usual financial processes and pain points teams face in their workflow, you will understand the importance of finance process management. It seems quite simple to understand, but what is it really? Finance process management is the way to organise and systematise finance-related work functions to be executed smoothly and correctly. Basically, it is a way to streamline the many steps finance processes go through into a coherent, consistent, and easy to understand workflow. 

5 Tips to improve finance operation processes

Leading a finance team is already a very difficult and laborious task, let alone if you try to do it through manual processes. As we mentioned above, the main challenges finance and accounting teams face can be easily tackled and improved with today’s technology. That’s why project management collaborative tools not only digitise your workflow but also offer a repetitive system that helps to easily keep record and track of your work and maintain all processes standardised.

However, not all workflow management tools are made equal. Here are some examples on how MORNINGMATE tools can help with finance processes management without you having to stress on building and implementing it on your own:

1. Update your task management tool

Spend less on the repetitive daily tasks by using a task manager like MORNINGMATE. This will help you streamline your workflow and make it more agile by replicating task templates that list the needed subtasks for fulfillment. Here you can attach files to your description, set start and due dates as well as reminders, priority levels, and the work progress status of the current tasks at hand.

2. Assign roles and responsibilities with clarity

The key to optimisation and efficiency is having your roles and responsibilities very clear, sounds very easy to do, but in practice, it can get rather confusing and complicated when executing a team task. With collaboration tools like MORNINGMATE, every single element of a project can be assigned to its corresponding team member, such as the project board’s manager, project task’s manager, and even down to the independent subtask responsibilities and member accesses.

3. Keep an organised track of documents and receipts

With MORNINGMATE you can make article posts in which you can upload all the information and files (such contracts, receipts, among others) and share it on the project feed to leave a track history of all the files you need in one single place. To make things even easier, you can also pin posts that are currently relevant or require quick access to the information at the top of your project board.

4. Streamline expense submissions and approvals

MORNINGMATE’s task manager can be used for far more than managing tasks. The tool can be repurposed to make approvals by assigning a task post to a staff member so they can list their expenses as tasks and request your feedback. Then, you can use the “completed” status for approvals and the “hold” status for rejections. Making it easy and simple for everyone to know the status of their expense approvals and be able to discuss it directly on the same post.

5. Have full visibility and transparency

Trust is one of the most important and hardest things to handle for Finance teams, that’s why having platforms like MORNINGMATE in organisations can help everyone have full visibility on all work movements between team members and transparency on the interactions, processes, and decisions that are happening in real-time. Whether it’s on the project board, post comments, or private messenger, having all the information and visibility you need in one hub can make finance work much easier.

How do project management tools help you streamline your workflow?

Whether you do it manually or digitally, effective finance processes management is bound to improve the productivity and efficiency of your team and organisation. Save time and money by investing in collaboration tools like MORNINGMATE that help you manage roles and responsibilities, track documentation, and do other operational tasks that can improve your finance team’s workflow management and become more productive. Make the most out of your finance team talent and start optimising your workflow with MORNINGMATE.