CFOs and end users know that automation is the key to unlocking the untapped potential in finance operations. It empowers finance pros to gather data for smarter, faster decision-making easily and liberates them from repetitive tasks. While the benefits are clear, implementing and onboarding a new strategy isn’t always easy. Businesses can struggle to break free from legacy processes that allow them to harness the full power of automation, especially in sectors like professional services.
For many reasons, professional services firms tend to have complicated expense and AP processes. Billing is their lifeblood. Large multinational firms also have employees submitting expenses under various department, location, and seniority policies. Without automated solutions, companies must use manual intervention to properly validate thousands of invoices and expenses.
Finance teams can’t act on new strategic initiatives when inundated with taming the tide of expenses, reimbursements, and invoices through spreadsheets and cumbersome enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
But modern automation solutions enable finance and accounting teams to seamlessly integrate data across critical business functions, like AP and expense management, giving them critical insights without much effort. In our latest briefing paper from Harvard Business Review, Ventana Research senior vice president and research director Robert Kugel coins this the “no-hands approach” to finance automation. When data gets transferred from system to system without manually entering information, finance teams can expedite reimbursement processes and efficiently manage cash flow. This is, “no-hands” automation.
What can finance and accounting teams in the professional services sector accomplish when they embrace “no-hands” automation? Let's explore using the success stories of three law firms as examples.
Streamlining Approval Routing
Without automation, many professional services firms can’t codify or communicate expense approval processes properly, leading to reimbursement delays. Re-examining roles and responsibilities can help firms build an approval matrix that they can automate through their expense management solution.
Approval routes can be customized by hierarchy, transaction value thresholds, expense allocation coding, or attributes of the expense owner. Most professional services firms find that two to four levels of approval with the accounts payable staff as the final stop strikes the optimal balance. Too few levels compromise thorough expense review, while too much oversight can delay delivering timely reimbursements.
U.S.-based law firm Hinshaw & Culbertson illustrates how “no-hands” automation can streamline approval routing. Switching from Concur to Emburse Chrome River allowed the firm to customize rules and integrations to meet its unique legal requirements. Centralizing expense and invoice management increased visibility across the firm and streamlined AP processes, resulting in a 90% reduction in invoice processing time. What was once a 10-minute process per invoice now takes just a minute or two, giving the AP team significant time back for strategic work.
Validating Receipts and Invoices
Automation’s consistent, programmatic approach is ideal for framework-driven processes like AP and expense management. An automated finance system is especially powerful when integrated with optical character recognition (OCR) technology. This form of AI can scan receipts and invoices and identify crucial details like vendors, suppliers, expense categories, and materials, while automation mechanisms accurately extract and input that data into financial applications.
Australian law firm Hall & Wilcox struggled to keep up with its complex billing requirements. As a result, the AP team created manual workarounds to tackle duplicate data and validate whether expense reports aligned with credit card feeds. Upgrading to Emburse, with its OCR capabilities and automated rules and workflows, allows the firm to process a significant volume of invoices, credit card expenditures, and employee reimbursements without manual validation. End users submit expense reports and invoices from their mobile devices, and Emburse supports daily credit card data feeds with automatic receipt image matching. Automating expense and invoice processes saves the finance team more than 20 hours a month.
Strengthening Auditing and Compliance
The seamless flow of data across finance functions not only enhances operational efficiency but also empowers finance executives to wield stronger fraud and regulatory oversight. Many professional services firms struggle to maintain a clear audit trail for expense reports and invoices.
Such was the case for legal firm GrayRobinson before it deployed automated routing and approval mechanisms. Employees emailed expense documentation to the AP team, who would match it to the expense request, verify the amount, then print and rescan the report to enter it into their finance system. This convoluted invoicing and expense process often led the firm to double or triple-pay its invoices.
GrayRobinson turned to Emburse for a finance automation solution that could provide an audit trail and integrate seamlessly with their financial system and credit card feeds. Now, built-in rules and approval workflows automatically enforce the firm’s spending policies and require employees to submit documentation alongside their expense and invoice submissions. Capturing data at the sources creates an easy-to-follow audit trail. The automated process also makes it easy for AP to confirm receipts, requests, and invoices, while staying assured that the system’s rules eliminate duplicate entries and payments.
The Path Forward for Professional Services Firms
By embracing “no-hands” automation, professional services firms can optimize invoice and expense management, revolutionize AP processes, bolster compliance, and start to unleash their strategic potential. Hinshaw & Culbertson, Hall & Wilcox, and GrayRobinson serve as powerful testaments of the benefits of integrating AI and automation into legacy finance processes. Find yourself relating to any of these firms? Start saving your team time and simplifying complex processes today.
Explore the opportunities and benefits of replacing legacy financial processes with automated, data-driven software solutions. Our latest briefing paper from Harvard Business Review features a deep-dive example from a global law firm based in the U.S. Read now.