We recently conducted a survey of more than 500 corporate finance and travel professionals about the impact of the pandemic on AP payments and expense reimbursements at their organizations. The dual impact of organizations being more financially prudent and finance teams working from home instead of in the office has been significant in their ability to process them in a timely manner.
The results showed that COVID-19 has had long-lasting effects on finance teams and how they operate. This is especially true for those that previously relied on manual processes, as working from home has made it challenging for paper-based data to be shared. The survey found that:
One area where COVID-19 has driven positive (if necessary) change is as a driving force for financial process digitization. With offices closed due to COVID-19, many finance teams reported that it is increasingly inconvenient and logistically complicated to collect invoices from the mail or deliver printed checks to the post office.
While this shift to automation was driven by the need to bring paper processes online during the extended period of working from home, it has had many positive effects including happier employees and finance teams. One of the main reasons for this has been enabling teams to offload time-consuming, paper-based tasks, which allows them to focus on higher value tasks.
Here are some of the tangible time savings our customers have experienced by switching from manual to automated expense processing in the last year.