Making Finance Departments More Strategic
The pressure to do more with the same resources is a common challenge that finance teams in growing companies often have to face. As invoice volumes and reporting demands increase, there is not always scope to hire more staff. This is where automation can be highly beneficial. When routine work becomes more efficient, the team has more time to focus on higher-value tasks, such as supporting growth decisions and improving financial planning.
Automation Creates Space for Strategy
Automating recurring tasks, such as invoice processing, approvals, and monthly closings, reduces the manual workload and ensures that operations run smoothly, even as transaction volumes increase. Finance teams can then focus their attention on analysis, forecasting, and supporting business decisions rather than spending time on data entry and follow-ups.
In many companies, especially those growing around 16 to 19 percent per year, the time gained through automation helps prevent the finance team from reaching its limits. The intention isn’t to reduce roles, but to free capacity for value-driving work, such as identifying trends, assessing opportunities, and improving planning.
Key Strategic Areas for Finance
Once freed from repetitive work, finance departments can drive business value in several areas:
- Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) Support: Acquisitions require detailed financial checks and the integration of systems and reporting. This work is time-intensive and can only be done when the team has capacity.
- Business & Revenue Model Optimization: Adjusting pricing or packaging requires cross-functional alignment and detailed financial analysis, which is only possible when operational work is streamlined.
- Financial Analysis & Opportunity Detection: Additional analytical capacity allows the finance department to analyze customer and product data in more depth, identifying “white spots” areas where existing customers could adopt more products or services and turning these insights into concrete growth opportunities.
- Governance & ESG Reporting: Increasingly resource-intensive, but critical for compliance and corporate reputation.
- Faster Closing & Reporting: Stakeholders can make decisions based on up-to-date information when finance teams work quickly and shorten the reporting timeframe. For instance, reducing the monthly closing period from days 25–28 to day 10 enables issues such as revenue shortfalls to be identified promptly.
Onventis Invoice Processing for Strategic Finance
The speed of invoice processing directly affects how quickly the finance department gains visibility into the business. When invoices are processed efficiently and entered into the system promptly, financial data becomes available sooner. This enables the finance team to spot unusual spending, monitor cash flow more closely, and address issues before they escalate.
With Onventis Invoice Processing, teams spend less time chasing documents and correcting entries, and more time interpreting the numbers, providing leadership with timely insights rather than delayed reports.
AI and Technology: Enabler, Not Replacement
While AI and automation are often linked to role reductions, in high-growth environments the additional capacity they create is quickly absorbed by new responsibilities and rising complexity. The goal is not to replace roles, but to shift time toward work that requires judgment, collaboration, and strategic thinking.
In more stable or low-growth environments, however, automation has a different effect. Rather than absorbing a rising workload, it reduces repetitive manual steps, enabling teams to focus on accuracy, process quality, and advisory support. Work becomes more skilled and less administrative.
Finance as the Driver of Business Strategy
Strategic finance, of course, means accurate numbers, but it’s also about providing direction and foresight. As automation takes over repetitive work, finance evolves into a function that drives company-wide decisions. Tools like Onventis Invoice Processing help build this bridge: from operational control to strategic influence.
