Many businesses in SEA remain stuck in manual processing that involves Excel spreadsheets, data entry, and tedious manual reconciliation. Finance professionals often spend too much time searching, entering, and organizing data. In a study, 30% of an employee’s average workday is devoted to searching for the right information. 

While automation services from SaaS providers are booming in the city-state, a lot of SMBs are still struggling to understand and weigh in the pros and cons of accounting automation particularly on expense management and bill payments. 

The ugly truth behind current payment processes

The accounting process is naturally designed to be inefficient. It involves a step-by-step process that consumes time and effort just to generate the right amount of money tagged as receivables and payables. From recognition to reconciliation, finance employees use as many as 10 applications to complete the job. Considering how much time is wasted, finance employees often have limited time and rush their work to beat the deadline. This pressure results in errors and inconsistencies that lead to costly financial decision-making. 

Recently, the Singaporean government erroneously paid an excess of $370 million in wage support when wrong dates were used to determine the amount that 5,400 companies should get. This may not entirely be attributed to manual processing but business owners should realize the importance of cloud solutions in generating accurate data, reducing workflow by 80%, and coming up with cost-efficient business processing strategies. 

The benefits of using cloud payments software

Automated expense management systems like Spenmo can lessen the workload by up to 80%. Spenmo offers solutions with great visibility to the spending of each employee and accrued expense making every information accessible and verifiable in real-time. Just like sending an email, employees can do fast and easy invoice recognition, payment, and reconciliation. There is no need to prepare spreadsheets and enter data manually and suffer the ugly consequences of inaccuracies. 

Cost-efficiency is another obvious benefit of automation. By preventing errors, businesses enjoy the guarantee of paying the right amount of wages, supplies, and bills. Spenmo offers the advantage of saving up to $1000 per month on foreign exchange transactions as businesses leverage on 0% markup for overseas payments to suppliers and freelancers. Virtual cards that offer FX rates as low as 1.5% is an economical provision to SaaS subscriptions and marketing expenses paid in USD. 

Finance tech for fast-growing companies

Fast-growing companies in Asia should consider automation and cloud solutions to future-proof their finances. In a study conducted by Dell, businesses that invest in mobility, cloud, and big data see a 53% revenue increase compared to their competitors. It is undeniable that automation accelerates processes and operations while creating cost efficiencies and reducing risks.

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