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.

Resourcing, Ask the Experts

The 7 Jobs You Should be Outsourcing Now

No matter the size, all businesses have those admin tasks that are at once important, not urgent, and also really really boring. You have two options. You could:

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Words With The Weployees

Meet our Weployee of the Week - Tim Pritchard

Tim is a Marketing Graduate with Customer Service experience at one of Australia's largest Insurance companies. Since he became a Weployee in March 2020, he has earned himself a full 5 Star rating on our platform and has been re-booked by the same Weployers time and time again! He's one of our newest Weployees of the Week, congratulations Tim.

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Ask the Experts, Tips

How to Make Better Decisions

When I think about the best leaders I've worked with there has always been one element that stands true. I trust and respect their decision making. I don't have to want to be their best friend, but I have to believe in the decisions they make.

I'm faced with a multitude of decisions every day and my biggest priority, both professionally and personally, is to constantly improve how I make decisions. So I thought I'd share the four most important principles I've developed when it comes to making decisions. I've also added further reading within each principle, and if you're keen to learn more I'd highly recommend subscribing to the podcast and blog of Farnam Street as it's a goldmine of wisdom within this field of study.

Principle 1: Prioritise

We are faced with a paradox of our own evolutionary making. People who lack choice, seem to want and fight for choice but this has a cost. The more choices and decisions we make, the less effective we become over time at choice making. It's well understood now that we have limited resources when it comes to making decisions, and continually working this muscle creates decision fatigue. We see this in all parts of life, with research showing judges make poorer decisions later in the day. But we're not just talking about big decisions, choices come at us from all angles each day. Choosing what coffee to order, which shampoo to buy, if I should snooze my alarm or get up. No matter how trivial, they all have an impact on our ability to make good decisions. So to improve, the only option is to limit the number of decisions you make. A great tool I found on the Farnam Street blog was a take on the 2x2 Eisenhower matrix that categorised decisions into four categories.

Irreversible and inconsequential
Reversible and inconsequential
Reversible and consequential
Irreversible and consequential

Those decisions that are inconsequential, whether reversible or not, are to be delegated. For decisions that have consequences but are reversible - there is opportunity to run experiments of which your team or individuals can share the learnings. The only decisions that should require your brain power are those which are consequential and irreversible. Of course this is only a framework and you will have to clearly define what the terms ‘consequential’ and ‘reversible’ mean to you and your business. But this has already helped me focus on what matters and build capability and empowerment in my teams.

Further reading: https://fs.blog/2009/07/an-introduction-to-decision-making/

Principle 2: Give Yourself Time

It's easy to think that great decision makers are those that are instantly able to weigh up a scenario, identify the possible outcomes and come to an immediate decision. It's impressive but what's the rush? If this really is an important decision - by which I mean one that is both consequential and irreversible, then the desire to make an immediate decision is due to us falling prey to a cognitive bias of pushing to do what is easiest with the available information.

It's hard to think of opposing points of view or other alternate outcomes but that's really what success in my job is all about. I try to give myself time to think about as many contributing factors and apply as many lenses onto a situation as I can. Then I give myself thinking time. Personally, I’ve found I need to change my environment, go for a walk, or sit in another part of the office to let my mind wander around the decision. Play thought experiments and try to walk through the outcomes with different hats on.

One great model from the mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi is to inverse the problem. To do this, rather than try to think of solving a problem forward (for instance - trying to increase productivity in your team), instead invert the problem, and ask what are all the things that I could do to reduce productivity in my team. Then don't do them! It may not solve the problem you're facing but it can mean you don't factor in arguments that can lead to poor outcomes.

Further reading: https://fs.blog/2014/06/avoiding-stupidity/

Principle 3: Be accepting of ignorance

First let's define what a decision in uncertainty means. Uncertainty is when we don't know the outcome of a decision and we don't know the probability of those outcomes. This is different from a decision in risk - where we don't know the outcomes but we do know the probabilities. A professional poker player will know the probabilities of a win based on their hand but the outcome is still unknown. So, when dealing with uncertainty you are going to be ignorant of some elements that are relevant and consequential to a decision. Importantly there are two states of ignorance.

Primary ignorance: If you cannot see it or understand it, it does not exist
Recognised ignorance: We recognise we cannot predict all the outcomes

It may seem that if we can't predict the unknowable outcomes any better if they are recognised or not... then why bother. But when you are aware of your own ignorance, you can start to look for sources of cognitive bias that could cloud your decision-making. There are plenty of such biases that can affect how we approach decision making - but the three that are most relevant are:

Overconfidence Bias: The subjective confidence that accuracy of our own beliefs is higher than the objective accuracy
Salience Bias: We tend to focus on information that is more prominent and perceptible to us, ignoring factors that are less so.
Confirmation Bias: We tend to recall examples that reinforce our existing beliefs

Personally, I look to embrace my own ignorance when it comes to uncertainty and try to uncover how my decisions could be coloured.

Further reading: https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/fs/rzeckhau/anatomy of ignorance.pdf

Principle 4: Optimise for the long term

Another factor I find important is to optimise decisions for the long term. Again - the human brain is hard-wired to seek instant gratification. For me, this comes down to looking for win/win scenarios and what is called second order thinking. They are strikingly simple concepts in theory but both require conscious effort to implement. Any relationship, if it is to last, must be win/win so when I'm considering which direction to go, it must benefit both my customer, and Weploy as a business, if it has any chance to prosper over time. The other model, second order thinking can be boiled down to a simple phrase:

And then what?

If I make this decision now, what happens tomorrow, what about in a weeks time, a month, year, 10 years… Not all decisions need you to go too far in the future, but thinking about the branches of possible outcomes through and then what is hugely valuable. I regularly find decisions come up that can be negative in the first order (have a high cost, slow down production etc.) but when we move to the second order and third order they can become a net positive. As all of my decisions should look to build long term, sustainable competitive advantage, second order thinking is essential if I am to succeed.

Further reading: https://medium.com/@noahmp/second-order-thinking-3fc2a224b131

So those are the four principles I try to use when making decisions, hopefully you find it valuable and I'd love to hear more about the most important tricks and models you use to improve your decision making.

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My Tips for a Stress-Free EOFY

1. Payroll

2. Diary Management

3. Expense Reporting

4. CRM Management

5. Data Entry

Principle 1: Prioritise

Principle 2: Give Yourself Time

Principle 3: Be accepting of ignorance

Principle 4: Optimise for the long term

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