Accounting has come a long way from keeping a ledger with pen and paper. Automation is rapidly changing the landscape of the accounting industry, with processes constantly being streamlined and an interesting future ahead.
Inspired by the launch of our latest two-way integrations with Fortnox and ExactOnline, we explore the benefits of automating your accounting workflows and how it could look in the future as technology advances.
Arguably the biggest change accountants and finance teams have seen in recent years is how manual tasks are increasingly being taken care of by automation. The result? Countless hours of time saved.
Two-way communication between financial platforms and accounting software can unite your fintech stack. By importing your accounting setup to a financial platform like Juni you can save time doing your pre-accounting. Then, enable data exports to your accounting software to increase efficiency and accuracy when it’s time to do your bookkeeping.
If you’re tired of chasing colleagues for receipts, then consider how receipt inboxes and
auto-collecting receipts from an email account can save you valuable time. Apps that allow you to take pictures of your receipts and then upload them to your accounting software on the go can also be a great way to encourage colleagues to be punctual with providing receipts. AI and OCR capabilities can read the receipts and automatically input data into your accounting software, so you’re one step closer to creating that journal entry.
Matching your receipts to your transactions, or matching and removing any duplicate transaction data, is key to making sure your books are in order and you’re keeping the right accounting records.
Manually collecting then matching receipts to transactions can be a tedious task, and it’s easy to make mistakes. Automated matching, like Juni Receipt Matching, can auto-collect receipts and invoices from your inbox and automatically match them to the right transactions. You can also automatically import your receipts and invoices with your dedicated Juni inbox for effortless spend management, and match receipts to transactions.
If you have a high volume of transactions, you can save a lot of time and reduce mistakes by automating the process so you can get on with other tasks.
How you create your journal entry can vary depending on your tech stack. Perhaps you’re creating them in your accounting software or in a financial platform like Juni that offers pre-accounting for your transactions before you export them.
Creating journal entries manually can be really time-consuming, especially if you have a lot of transactions. Automation can take care of that for you by automatically assigning the right accounts, project codes, cost centres and VAT rates to your transactions, so all you need to do is record them in your accounting software.
Getting all your transactions in one place can often be the first hurdle of doing your accounting. Automation can take care of that for you with the right integrations.
By automatically exporting all your transaction, receipt and pre-accounting data to your accounting software, you’ll have everything you need to manage your books in one place.
When you don’t need to spend time manually adding information to your financial platform, you can get a real-time look at how your finances are performing. Bank feeds, automatic exports, the right integrations and automated report generation all combine to give you a bird's eye view of how your business is performing.
As technology improves, it’s likely that you’ll continue to be able to integrate your finance tech stack together to get faster and faster insights and a more accurate look at your finances at any point in time.
At the moment, you can automate a lot of your accounting reporting. For example, automatically generating your balance sheet, profit and loss statements, in some cases tax returns from your journal entries.
In future, the breadth of different types of automated reporting available will continue to grow, along with the ability to integrate with government portals for tax return submission and other compliance reports. The HMRC in the UK are already broadening the scope of Making Tax Digital, their digital tax return submission system, and many European countries also offer similar services. Accounting programs are catching up, giving you the ability to automatically generate your return and then submit it online. It’s possible that other countries will follow suit, and this aspect of compliance will become increasingly automated.
Data visualisation is another aspect of reporting that can benefit from automation. What you can visualise and how you do it will only become more sophisticated in the coming years.
Creating journal entries, financial reporting, and the tasks we’ve talked about so far are really error-prone. When you automate these tasks, you’re more likely to get everything correct.
At the moment, depending on your platform and what you’re automating, you may need to do some quality control. For example, checking your automated tax return before you submit it or approving matched transactions. But, as technology gets smarter, it’s likely that this quality control will be needed less and less over time.
AI is changing the game for accounting. It’s already being used for tasks like reading receipts and creating rules to automate processes like creating journal entries. AI is really helpful when it comes to analysing huge amounts of data really quickly, which is great for streamlining reconciliation and doing risk management.
Generative AI became the buzzword of 2023, and for good reason – the implications of generative AI in fintech are huge.
When looking at accounting automation specifically, in future, you could use generative AI to help with scenario planning, generate insights or help with problem-solving.
The roles of finance teams are changing, largely due to automation. Teams are becoming increasingly efficient, leaving more time available to explore the data they’re handling.
When automation can take care of the nitty gritty, time-consuming tasks, teams have more time to focus on interpreting data. Getting this time back is key in providing valuable insights and advice to the business.
We know it can take hours to close your books. Doing pre-accounting, adding your transactions to your accounting software and sorting out your receipts – the hours add up.
We created our integrations with Fortnox and ExactOnline to give you back valuable time and streamline your accounting workflow. Here’s how:
Streamline your month-end and save hours of manual work with lightning-fast pre-accounting and powerful integrations that put you in complete control of your finances.
*Pre-accounting is currently available for Swedish customers. Want access in another market? Just ask your account manager at onboarding.
This article was updated January 2024
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