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My Tips for a Stress-Free EOFY

4 Min Read
Nick   |   January 14, 2019
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The Finance Department is key to the success of every business in the world: big or small; merchandiser, manufacturer to agency. There are important business priorities that must be managed by the Finance team to do with reporting and compliance.

Finance are tasked with supporting management in the creation of value by identifying cost-saving opportunities for the entire business. Alongside this of course, they are in charge of balancing the books day to day, overseeing the daily and weekly incomings and outgoings, sending invoices, managing payrolls and (if you’re anything like us) chasing lunch receipts and educating the internal team on expenses procedures. It’s no coincidence that the financial services are notorious for the longest hours worked across all industries. Of all the more manual processes managed by a lean Finance team, we’ve selected the top 5 tasks that can easily be taken on by a Weployee, in order to help you relieve the burden and focus on the wider, strategic tasks that will shape the business financials in the long run.

1. Payroll

Employees and contractors need to be  accurately paid each day, week, or month to minimise the business from compliance risk. Managing payroll can be a time consuming, but critical task to a business and even using software like Xero or MYOB, the process needs to be maintained for accuracy each month taking into account actual days worked, new starters and team changes. Our pool of on-demand staff have already been through a 6-stage vetting process to assess skills like dexterity and flexibility picking up new software like Xero, so hiring a Weployee once a month, or for a few days per week is the smartest way to outsource your payroll work.

2. Diary Management

Heading up any Finance team is the financial leader, CFO or Finance Manager, whose job is to lead the finance and accounting team members. He or she will be managing process for financial forecasting and budgeting and providing strategic recommendations to the CEO or President and executive teams. Maintaining and building relationships with key partners and external stakeholders is integral to the role, and this may involve meetings and travel. You could have a member of the finance team manage the resulting transport, hotels, flights and scheduling, but this will mean taking them off the BAU and overloading them with admin work that may cause them to feel stressed and overworked. When there is high attention to detail and perfect accuracy required for balancing the business numbers - this is a dangerous strategy. Smarter finance teams are outsourcing travel arrangements and diary management to external temps, so that the finance team members can continue to focus on what they’re best at. 

3. Expense Reporting

Whether manual or automated, expense claims, authorisation, auditing and repayment is a necessary process that every business must repeat each month. Expense management has two equally important aspects: the process employees follow in order to complete an expense claim (logging a hotel or meal receipt or submitting mobile phone records) and the activity accounts or finance staff undertake to process the claim. Typically, a manual process will involve an employee completing a paper or spreadsheet that they then forward, along with the relevant receipts to a manager or other controller for approval. Once the manager has approved the claim, they forward it on to accounts for processing. The accounts staff then key each expense item into the company's finance system before filing the claim and receipts away. With a SaaS system implementation these processes are largely automated and the submission and approvals processes can be transacted electronically, but in most cases, this must still must be overseen with human intervention to make sure employees are following process correctly, and receipts are matching up. At EOFY especially, reconciling all this can feel like a huge burden on a small finance team. Outsourcing this process to a Weployee each month will enable finance teams to focus on what really matters to the business, and may even provide an extra motivator for employees to submit what is needed on time for the Weployee to arrive! 

 4. CRM Management

Another key part of any Finance Leader role will be attending Financial Conferences to stay abreast of industry and government changes, network and meet potential new customers or partners. This will result in large stacks of business cards or email addresses for arranging follow up meetings or calls post event... an important but rather lengthy and boring task that will often fall down the priority list when everyone has their heads down back at their desks. Why not employ a temp for a few hours following each event to update the Customer Relationship Management system and set up a workflow for mail outs or meeting requests?

 5. Data Entry

Necessary for any Finance team will be the entering of data from various sources directly into the company computer systems for processing and management. Often confidential in nature, the data will need to be reviewed and checked for errors or incompatibilities and will often involve laborious scanning and printing of documents too. Reports must be compiled and records saved in appropriate places for use by the wider team… all of which takes hours that may be spent on tasks that actively contribute to increasing business revenue. At Weploy HQ, our Finance Manager employs a Weployee at the end of each month to help with her data entry and relieve the rest of her full time team of the arduous task required so that they can focus on what really matters to the growth of the business.

 

If you ever feel like you're draining time on tasks which are distracting you from your biggest business priorities, or need some relief at difficult times like EOFY, book a demo today and a member of our team will show you how to streamline your internal processes and allow your Finance team to focus on what really matters.

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