Only 20% of companies in Belgium have adopted a fully automated process as per this finance report

The 2021 State of Automation in Finance report is out! The report explores the landscape of finance and accounting practices and identifies decision-maker expectations, concerns, and outlook for 2022, with an eye on the technologies that enable organisations to move towards automation. 

Yooz, the Cloud-based Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) automation software company, and Fintech Belgium, an independent federation for fintech in Belgium, have revealed the Belgian results of a survey conducted among international companies with 50 to 500+ employees operating in the country in 2021. 

Here’re the five important takeaways: 

Digital transformation

According to the report, 75 per cent of the companies surveyed recognised that the COVID-19 crisis accelerated digital transformation in their accounting and finance department. 

Financial recovery

More than 30 per cent of the companies surveyed feel that it will take more than two years to financially recover from COVID-19 crisis, while 15 per cent think it will take from one to two years.

Challenges

The survey says companies had identified three challenges before the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Adapting to changes in their environment (concerning regulatory issues)
• Adapting to digital transformation
• Increasing productivity

The companies have also identified two new post-Covid challenges: 

• Optimising financial processes 
• Reinforcing cybersecurity

Delay in automating accounts payable processes

As per the report, significant progress has to be made in automating accounts payable processes as only 20 per cent of the companies have automated their processes so far. 

The main barriers, according to the survey, are:

• Process complexity 
• Multiplicity of channels (paper, e-mail, EDI, scans…), 
• Change management.

Delaying the implementation of automation to the AP process results in various problems like increased late payments, deterioration of supplier relations, additional costs, errors, and lost documents, claims the report. 

For 80 per cent of the companies, COVID-19 had an impact on their ability to process invoices within deadlines. 10 per cent of the accounts payable departments spend over 100 hours per month processing invoices.

Another collateral effect of the delay in implementing automation to the AP process is the inability to work remotely. 

As a result, around 52 per cent of the companies found that their remote working methods for handling accounts payable were not able to function efficiently.

Investments

According to the survey, companies are looking for a secure solution that can integrate with other software packages to help extract massive amounts of data in real-time. The companies are seeking technological investment in cybersecurity, transition to the Cloud, artificial intelligence, and analytics. 

Real performance requirements are at stake, beyond the strict need for automation, says the report. 

“In this context where competitive advantage and differentiation have never been more important for companies, the results of this survey show that digitisation is a prerequisite condition, but that it alone is not enough,” says François Lacas, Deputy Chief Operational Officer at Yooz.

“Starting in 2021, automation represents the next step to meet ever-growing needs for immediacy, security, and reliability for accounting information. Yooz provides the market’s most advanced solution for automating the Purchase-to-Pay process to help financial professionals satisfy these needs,” Lacas added.

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