The key to generating profit from within the accounting department is to give your team the time to offer value-added services and strengthen key relationships. Laurent Charpentier explains how.

Today’s business climate demands we do more with less and this means that even our most vital cost-management teams are now expected to do more to boost the bottom line. Here are some strategies that can help your accounting team to generate revenue as well as cut costs.

Task automation

Applying automation to streamline tasks can save you money — take the many vendors who like to offer early payment discounts as one example.

By automating invoice and payment processes, your team can capture “early-bird” discounts consistently. This in turn can reduce the cost of company expenses because it means you pay less on invoices and avoid fees on overlooked payments.

Automating time-consuming manual tasks also means your accounting staff have more time to focus on strategic tasks.

They can concentrate on the payment deadlines for accounts receivables, and on collecting other receivables, such as deposits, structured payment arrangements and delinquent fees.

Going paperless

Operating an eco-friendly business is the way of the future, but many organisations continue to rely heavily on paper, despite the availability of inexpensive cloud storage — and accounting departments tend to be heavy power users when it comes to paper consumption.

Shifting to a mainly paperless model can cut costs on several fronts. It lessens the equipment and ink costs associated with printing and copying. It also reduces the shipping, delivery, storage, and other procurement costs associated with document handling.

For receivables, generating invoices digitally and emailing them to clients enhances visibility and accountability, further ensuring more on-time payments.

For payables, adopting secure e-check, credit card or even virtual credit card payment policies, cuts down on the number of cheques processed, shortening your payment windows and strengthening vendor relationships.

Finally, creating and storing digital records can speed up access to those documents, as well as help to reduce fraud and comply with tax audits.

Data silos

Data silos are information, files, software or data points accessible by one department but isolated from the rest of the organisation.

As organisations grow, these silos can make internal data sharing more complex, resulting in a severe lack of transparency, efficiency, and trust.

This is especially detrimental in accounting as it can limit meaningful analysis, create workflow blocks and delay the availability of vital financial data, hindering the organisation’s decision-making process.

You can start to dismantle these silos by integrating departments and platforms using enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. This can help to collect and centralise data across multiple departments.

Once you eliminate accounting data silos, you can then help to support analysis across the organisation aimed at uncovering insights that can help to improve profitability.

Teams will have greater scope to work together and make better decisions. They can identify valuable new opportunities and develop better habits for management spend and keeping costs down.

Profit generation

Having already saved time and money by automating processes, you can now direct your accounting team’s focus to strengthen relationships with vendors.

Paying vendors on time helps to maintain relationships, making it easier to negotiate discounts – and discounts mean wider margins and higher profits.

Beyond timely payments and discounts, positive vendor relationships can also help to ensure fewer delays in your materials supply chain – the kind that might delay customer deliveries. Keeping that revenue flowing is key to profitability.

With more time, your team can also offer other value-add services to customers. Offering creative financing terms can earn you transaction fees while also making payments easier for them, for example.

These and other accounting-related services can boost profitability as well as reduce processing times, fraud, and transaction costs.

Laurent Charpentier is the Chief Operations Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Yooz Inc.