We were moving along pretty quickly towards digitization and automation in the workplace until COVID-19 hit and caused one of the greatest disruptions in a generation. Now, as the dust starts to settle and we look towards going back to a semblance of normalcy, one thing is clear: this pandemic has only accelerated the business case for digitization and automation.
As you look at your finance and tax departments and consider whether now is the right time for you to make a business case for transformation:
Evaluate how your new normal changes how you manage your function. We’ve shifted from working in the office to being remote, and many of us will likely continue to be fairly remote until there’s a vaccine. We must rely less on paper than ever before for health and safety reasons. We can’t travel as much to be with our global teams. Does your IT infrastructure enable seamless teaming and collaboration?
Review the need for time savings and freeing up capacity. Between reduced availability as team members need to make time for taking care of family, cost-cutting needs and additional work created by the pandemic, finance and tax functions are looking at ways to find time savings that automation can deliver. Do you have a roadmap for how to enable your teams to accomplish their goals without burning out?
Gauge impact of business processes on employee engagement and productivity. As teams work from home, not having the right tools to enable them for success can be a drain on both employee engagement and productivity. On the other hand, having the right collaboration tools, easy access to data and automated data wrangling and calculation tools can enhance the employee experience and improve both impact and retention.
Assess how automation may impact more than just your function. While automation can free up valuable time in the tax department, for example, we find that for every hour tax spends, finance can spend up to three hours trying to get the right data to tax, responding to queries on data changes and using outputs from tax to make journal entries and topside adjustments. While digitization and automation can save valuable time in tax, don’t lose sight of time and effort savings they can generate in other functions.
Estimate impact on internal controls and overall risk management. Manual data wrangling and reliance on multiple sources of information can increase the risk of inadvertent errors, but automation can help reduce this risk. The first step in any automation project is defining and simplifying the process, which builds consistency, enhances controls and reduces risk. While the benefits of risk reduction are difficult to quantify, a business case for automation shouldn’t lose sight of these.
A good business case should be Phase 0 of any automation journey.
Setting up a detailed business case for automation upfront helps in getting broad buy-in from management and team members. It facilitates change management, as everyone has clarity on what the objectives are, and it enhances the adoption of new processes and tools to help you achieve your objectives. A good business case also allows you to prioritize and implement change in bite-sized chunks where appropriate.
If you’re interested in learning more about digital transformation for tax, check out our Tax transformed web page.
First published on my LinkedIn page