The accounting and book-keeping industry has changed in the last few years. It has experienced low business traffic and a change in the usual way of doing business. The emergence of new technologies and the global pandemic contributed to these drastic changes.
With the modifications and constant shifts in consumer needs and preferences, you must keep up with these changes as a business. Although it is hard to make future predictions about business trends, you can promptly prepare for these changes when you implement new policies and regulations.
Invoicing and accounting processes could be tricky and hard to track without the right strategies. So following recent changes ensures your business has access to improved productivity, revenue, and client retention. Here are some trends that are prominent in 2022.
AI Software and Technology
Although AI technology is yet to replace human intelligence, it has much potential. Artificial Intelligence is currently driving industry transformation and giving businesses a competitive edge.
When sending out invoices, AI can help you process them efficiently. For instance, AI can detect the cost-intensive processes in your invoicing system. So, instead of wasting resources on methods that are not cost-effective, you can save and divert the costs to other business activities.
In accounting, it can detect data breaches and losses. AI can flag any irregularities in your accounting system. This way, you can check the marked inconsistencies to determine the priority level instead of going through tons of documents and data.
AI has the advantage of completing repetitive and data-intensive tasks with minimal human interference. It drastically reduces invoicing procedures by 90%
Automation and Optimization
From data management to business tasks, there’s no end to how automation can improve efficiency and fuel productivity in book-keeping and accounting processes. More businesses are investing in automation processes and software to drive positive business changes and improve workflow.
Some sectors that already use automation to merge and streamline their production tasks include:
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- Customer and customer services: To better track work, book-keeping, and invoicing, businesses offering consumer services, especially those who provide in-home and in-office deliveries, need digitalization to run these processes effectively. It is the key to keeping up with evolving business trends, improving customer satisfaction, reducing operational costs, and increasing revenue.
- Supply chain: Due to the increase of people who work from home, the logistics sector needs ways to improve its delivery channels. They are digitizing logistics to accelerate their supply chain and ensure the speedy delivery of services. Optimizing logistics reduces damage to the goods as they make their way to the customers. Automation also introduces paperless transactions, which is necessary to improve customer satisfaction.
- Invoicing and accounting: Payments have been an issue of discord with complications like underpayments. You can optimize 93% of your payment procedures by using AP automation software, retain customers, and increase business revenue.
- HR: Businesses need to adopt solutions that will increase the efficiency of the human resource department. HR manages processes that connect directly to employees, such as onboarding, staff retention, payroll, and work benefits. Therefore solutions that will optimize workflow within the department are required.
- Retail and wholesale consumer goods supply: Imagine running a sales offer or an ad campaign for winter jackets without knowing your available stock. With automation, you can manage your inventory effectively. It lets you know when you’re running out of a particular product and provides the solution of scheduling bulk purchases of these products. You can offer self-service options in your online store and optimize multi-channel operations with minimal human resources.
Outsourcing
Businesses have seen the need to focus their energy on the processes requiring the most attention to detail and human resources. For small and medium-scale enterprises, it’s about finding the right talent to spearhead their productive procedures or increase the functionality of their business platforms.
Since inconsistencies in the workforce available to handle critical organizational aspects can deter business growth, companies now seek predictability in the external workforce to ensure the proper functioning of their business procedures.
Upskilling Of Staff
While the labor shortages drag on in 2022, you have to make the most of your available human resources. You need to upskill your staff base to reduce wastages of business resources. Without a strong workforce, labor costs will increase, business processes will be slower, and inconsistencies will reduce your ROI.
Investing in upskilling that meets current demands in the industry is vital, which will, in turn, give you a competitive edge in acquiring new staff. Some technologies that can help upskill staff and reduce drudgery are:
- Robotics process automation (RPA): This helps to accelerate mundane and repetitive tasks prone to errors and data discrepancies. It improves staff strength and motivation, which allows them to focus on other business issues.
- Book-keeping software: Investing in book-keeping and accounting software detects and eliminates inaccuracies while consolidating business ledgers and accounts.
- Business workshops and courses: When you give your staff the option of improving their skills, it helps to retain good quality workers. Upskilling your team eliminates revenue that would have been used to hire, onboard, and regularly train new staff. Even administering excel skills tests, supplemented by upskilling to meet identified needs, will reinforce accuracy and agility from employees. You will have the edge over.
E-invoicing
An invoicing template helps to speed up the organization of the billing information required to send and receive payments successfully. It helps to reduce the costs of conducting manual invoicing and billing procedures by 20%. These templates have become popular for their ease of adoption and usability.
Countries are applying invoicing solutions across all business sectors to improve and track payment processes. For instance, federal agencies in America have been mandated to issue e-invoices for all products and services. Adoption of invoicing and accounting solutions will cut down costs and store important billing information, which will, in turn, reduce payment disputes and fraud.
Contactless Mode of Payment
Contactless payments, also known as cashless payments, have become necessary since the advent of the global epidemic in 2020. So, more customers now require contactless payments for an omnichannel payment experience. Cashless payments such as digital wallets have become famous for their ease of accessibility and security.
Digital wallets are not new, as they became part of the invoicing process in 1997. A few years later, in 2014, digital wallets developed into a hot payment trend after the release of Apple Pay. Experts predict that the global adoption of digital wallets will reach 75% by 2025. This will revolutionize the accounting and bookkeeping industry, especially how people receive and transfer funds.
Cloud Computing and Storage
Remember how unreliable it was to process and collate paperwork at the end of each business day? Now you can do it all with cloud services. How we work has drastically changed in 2022, with several new processes requiring up-to-date infrastructure to function.
Businesses worldwide will need to upgrade their cloud computing facilities. This is to keep up with changing trends and leverage the power of technology in their production and distribution procedures. Businesses that have apps must improve their functionality and seek to leverage cloud storage to refine their working processes.
Without the implementation of cloud services, apps that fail to meet the current industry standards will evolve. They will no longer be available for your customers, and your revenue will be reduced without a platform to facilitate business interactions.
Blockchain Technology
These days, blockchain not only pertains to the cryptocurrency sector but is also making waves in the accounting and finance industry. The use of blockchain will start to see some use cases in regular business transactions. They will become legitimate means of business transactions due to more customers seeking businesses that can accept payments in cryptocurrencies like Shiba Inu and bitcoin.
With more opportunities opening up in the crypto world, investment in blockchain technology will soon become popular and on demand. So, more businesses will implement blockchain technology in their existing apps or create new ones focusing on cryptocurrency transactions.
Data Analytics, Digital, and Social Media Marketing
In 2022, businesses need to go digital as they seek to gain more insights into their book-keeping, invoicing, and accounting procedures. Digitizing data helps to get critical metrics, confirm the effectiveness of business strategies, and streamline business activities. It is now a mainstream automation strategy.
Data analytics provides the records we need to create advertising campaigns across all social media and web platforms. The effectiveness of the drives is also dependent on the procured data. Automation of the data resources will make it easier to make future predictive analyses about critical business metrics.
Remote Working and Collaboration
In just two years, we’ve seen that physical working collaboration may not be as important to doing business like we have previously believed. Remote working means companies can conduct productive processes with different people from any part of the world. Agile work schedules are easy to manage, especially with the proper teamwork and collaborative tools.
Remote working will reinforce the premise of trust and teamwork in a company. It also means your business can hire the best hands who can upskill at any time without interrupting their daily business activities.
