Automation is sometimes a scary word, often associated with robots and dystopian future. There’s a common fear that automation and robots will take over jobs and displace people which is actually not what technology is on track to do. Less than 10% of jobs can actually be fully automated, however automation can be a great help to office workers when leveraged by companies to help improve their staff performance and overall reputation.
Automation in customer service, marketing, and sales are all available to support property management companies, but how can automation benefit accounting?
Time
Automation in accounting enhances the efficiencies of processes that otherwise are heavily manual. By streamlining time-intensive, accounting teams have more time and can accomplish more in less time. On average automation can saves one person up to an hour of work per day but can ultimately streamline multiple days of work if implemented across the entire department. Of all accounting tasks, accounting software can currently automate approximately 50% of work for property management companies, while accounting processes that are more labor intensive and stressful including payroll management and tax preparation is expected to be fully automated by the end of 2020.
Accuracy
Technology has a better margin of error than humans who are likely to make mistakes when dealing with lots of numbers at once and repetitive data entry. Software automation can help prevent errors especially when inputting numbers. This can boost data integrity and minimize employee stress of making mistakes. Automation facilitates boosts data integrity, minimizes employee stress of mistakes, and ensures balanced books every time.
Costs
Accounting automation can reduce operation costs and increase revenue. Paper based tasks can be expensive when considering the cost of paper and related tools, like pens, printers, file cabinets, folders, scanner, highlighters and so much more. Misplaced documents in addition to filing, searching, and compiling documents all cost organizations money which can be saved by digitizing and automation common accounting practices. Across the accounting department, automation can reduce costs businesses incur drastically. Leveraging AP automation alone can help businesses save an average of $16 for every invoice.
Growth
For everyone involved, adding a new property to the portfolio is a victory but it can be stressful because a growing portfolio means a multiplying workload. Software automation allows property management companies to tackle the growing workload without growing the team. Automation is a resource to accounting teams it does the heavy lifting with ease and speed which allows staff to go through their day to day tasks without compromising productivity.
Job Satisfaction
Property management accounting staff actively work with sensitive customer banking information as well as company banking information where seemingly small mistakes can have larger repercussions which create a lot of stress. Knowing that technology and automation can help process transactions with greater accuracy and speed which helps accounting teams preform at the top of their game.
Automation helps to eliminate tedious and redundant work like data entry which can be boring and lack excitement so staff can focus on meaningful and more exciting work that allows them to showcase their actual skills beyond typing and data entry.
