Financial Management in the Digital Age - 3 things that every Financial Manager must keep in mind
The Financial-Accounting department is one of the most important branches of an organization. Every executive should know that having a performant finance department is crucial to the profitability, growth and success of the organization.
Planning, analyzing, collecting, organizing, auditing and controlling the company’s finances are the main activities of a financial department. These activities involve access to personal and confidential documents making the job function even more challenging that it already is. It is essential for the employees in the financial department to have complete control over all the confidential documents they are working with every day.
By implementing an automated process of safe document processing and distribution, the financial managers can focus on anticipating future company investments and running scenarios so other departments can make smart and informed business decisions.
Main challenges within the Finance-Accounting department:
Let’s take a look at the challenges you are facing every day and the impact they have on your business:
CHALLENGES
BUSINESS IMPLICATIONS
- High volumes of unstructured data
- Lack of reporting or audit capabilities for internal and external requests
- Lack of visibility of existing documents
- Time consuming processes of manually search documents spread around different locations and systems
- Securely share documents with other departments
- Lack of a secured common repository based on access rights
- Duplication of effort
- High costs and pressure for the IT department that needs to manage multiple content repositories and systems
- Slow, difficult access to financial-accounting documents
- High costs and pressure for the IT department that needs to manage multiple content repositories and systems
- Lack of productivity, efficiency
- High risk of keeping and securely share sensitive data
- Fines and reputational risk due to improper use of regulated content
- Additional costs associated with storing documents in physical format and printing them
- Time and additional cost for the Financial team that must ensure legal compliance through manual processes
We live in an always-changing business environment where you can’t afford to be out of step. To ensure that your Financial department is at its maximum efficiency and productivity you need to implement a solution that will help them access the documents they need at one click away. This solution needs to be very easy to implement and adopt at the company level; a central repository where you can capture and archive all the documents – paper and electronic. Adopting this solution will help you and your colleagues get rid of all the time consuming manual work needed to search and archive documents.
Here are 3 things that each Financial Manager should do:
1. Build and deploy a unified records management strategy around metadata
There is no such thing as unstructured data. There is only data without a metadata associated to it. Implement a solution that offers security and a unified repository for business documents with flexible data managements features, including metadata indexing, advanced search, retrieval, unlimited navigational perspectives and content sharing features. Get rid of the chaos of finding the information you need at any time and review and approve the financial agreements in a timely manner.
2. Keep your business processes auditable
The lack of preparation for an audit can put your company at high risks and it’s very costly. Choose a solution that offers you a go to place where you can collect, maintain updated financial documentation and securely share information with your peers but also with external parties such as analysts, creditors, auditors without putting at risk sensitive data. At the same time, maintain compliance with the companies and government regulations. Also, keep track of who is responsible of every task along the way, who shares, access or updates/deletes the financial documents with permanent audit trails.
3. Increase user adoption with a powerful, yet simple technology
Adopting a new technology is considered a real struggle by businesses and especially by the employees. As a Financial Manager you are focused on processes, but also on how people work and the tools they need in order to become more efficient. Choose a solution that is affordable, easy to use and deploy, designed for non-IT users and that can be integrated into current business processes and systems in a way that limits disruption and the need for time-consuming trainings.
Check the best option for your challenges by accessing SEAL’s product page – the complete solution for centralizing, managing and archiving the business records of your company either on paper or electronic.
For any additional information or questions, you can write us at seal@star-storage.eu.