I run a small manufacturing distributor and this hit way too close to home. We hired an experienced accountant last year expecting financial analysis and strategy. Instead, she spends 16 hours a week literally typing invoice numbers into QuickBooks.
The math in the article is depressing but accurate - we're paying ~$28k/year for what's essentially clerical work. And the error rate thing is real. Last quarter we paid a vendor $15,000 instead of $1,500 because someone transposed two digits. Took three weeks to sort out.
We finally bit the bullet and set up document automation (using one of those AI OCR tools). Went from 25 minutes per invoice to about 1 minute of review time. Processing 800 invoices/month means we got back roughly 320 hours.
Now she actually does the job we hired her for - cash flow forecasting, vendor negotiations, spotting problems before they become crises. Productivity didn't just improve, it completely transformed.
I'm curious if other folks here have experienced this. Are your finance people actually doing finance, or are they stuck doing data entry that could be automated?
The math in the article is depressing but accurate - we're paying ~$28k/year for what's essentially clerical work. And the error rate thing is real. Last quarter we paid a vendor $15,000 instead of $1,500 because someone transposed two digits. Took three weeks to sort out.
We finally bit the bullet and set up document automation (using one of those AI OCR tools). Went from 25 minutes per invoice to about 1 minute of review time. Processing 800 invoices/month means we got back roughly 320 hours.
Now she actually does the job we hired her for - cash flow forecasting, vendor negotiations, spotting problems before they become crises. Productivity didn't just improve, it completely transformed.
I'm curious if other folks here have experienced this. Are your finance people actually doing finance, or are they stuck doing data entry that could be automated?