Start with volume, not complexity
The biggest mistake we see is teams trying to automate their most complex process first — usually financial reporting or budgeting. The fastest wins come from automating high-volume, repetitive processes instead. Complexity can wait; volume cannot.
Invoice and receipt capture
OCR extraction of vendor, amount, GST and line items removes the single highest-volume manual task in most finance teams.
Accounts payable approvals
Routing invoices for approval automatically — with reminders — removes the bottleneck of chasing sign-off by email.
Bank and supplier reconciliations
Automated matching flags only the exceptions, instead of requiring a full manual line-by-line review every period.
Customer invoicing and AR follow-up
Automatic invoice generation and overdue reminders keep cash flow moving without manual chasing.
Accruals and prepayments
Recurring accrual and amortisation schedules should calculate and post themselves each period, not rely on someone remembering.
Deferred revenue recognition
For businesses with contracts spanning multiple periods, automated recognition schedules prevent revenue being booked too early or too late.
Management reporting
Once the ledger is clean, the monthly pack should generate on a schedule rather than being rebuilt by hand.
How to prioritise across these seven
Rank each process by two factors: how many hours it currently costs your team each month, and how error-prone it is when done manually. Processes that score high on both — usually invoice capture and reconciliations — should be automated first.
You do not need to automate everything
Partial automation is a legitimate strategy. Many businesses automate two or three of these seven processes and leave the rest manual because the volume does not justify it yet. Automation should follow where the time is actually going, not a theoretical ideal.