Solidify Your Digital Strategy: How Automation Helps You Overcome Skills Gaps

Finance teams today are facing unique challenges as they adapt to the post-pandemic landscape. Between shifts in the talent landscape and ongoing recession fears, finance leaders are now focused on steering their organizations through turbulent market conditions that require faster, more accurate forecasting and reporting capabilities to support agile decision-making.

According to recent insightsoftware research skills shortages in finance teams and a tight labor market are among the greatest challenges facing finance leaders today. When staffing is tight, automation changes from a luxury to a necessity. While many leaders plan to address the skills gap through hiring and employee training and development, a significant percentage of leaders are also looking to software implementation and automation to bridge the gap.

As finance teams work to find balance and efficiency with the resources immediately available, CFOs are once again looking to digital transformation to make better use of existing skillsets and remove mundane, repetitive tasks from workers to increase job satisfaction while aiding employee retention.

How Skills Shortages Are Impacting Finance Teams

Facing pressure from inflation, economic disruption, and a looming recession, the same research report shows that senior accounting and finance professionals are becoming increasingly less efficient across all major responsibilities — such as tax management, strategic decision-making, and short-term business strategy — as they strive to do the same or more work with fewer resources than the previous year.

Among the many factors contributing to finance team pressure, reduced hiring is one of the biggest issues. The pandemic and later Great Resignation inspired employees to leave in droves – whether for early retirement or for career changes – and finance leaders are struggling to attract qualified talent to fully staff their teams.

Surprisingly, as tighter budgets slow down hiring from an already limited talent pool, fewer finance professionals are prioritizing automation: only 25% of respondents, down 15% from 2022. This may be due in part to the tense relationship between finance and IT, with only 28% of respondents completely satisfied with their tech teams and 66% already feeling too reliant on them.

These statistics indicate that finance leaders may feel like new automation technology will only create work and further degrade their relationship with IT but in fact, the opposite is true. By providing intuitive software that sidesteps the skills you’re lacking via automation you will greatly reduce load on IT and be able to rapidly respond to analysis requests.

Things to Consider with Smaller Finance Teams

It’s important for finance leaders to find ways to create efficiencies without disrupting their employees’ work/life balance; after all, no leader wants to see their staffing issues exacerbated by burnout and high turnover.

Keeping this in mind, finance leaders are strategizing ways to address the challenges their teams are facing. Approximately equal numbers of leaders are working to hire more people and planning software and ERP upgrades to address skills shortages and create efficiencies.

Whether organizations want to increase staff, tech investments, or both, it’s clear that scalable, agile solutions are needed to meet the office of finance’s ever-evolving needs. Finance decision makers should seize every opportunity to automate processes when possible, freeing up resources for deeper analysis and strategic planning and forecasting.

Using Automation to Make Up for Missing Skills

Jet Analytics from insightsoftware automates repetitive manual processes and enables finance teams to achieve agility, scalability, and self-service capabilities. The result: real-time reporting, deep-dive analytics, and faster decision-making.

As more finance teams integrate reporting and analytics software like Jet Analytics into their daily processes, they reap the benefits. Jet provides a single source of truth for all financial and operational reporting, allowing your finance team to:

• Gain Control and Consistency Over Your Data – Benefit from consistently applied business logic across all your data. No more re-creating calculations in various front-end tools.
• Report Across Multiple Data Sources – Easily consolidate multiple data sources in one place, combining ERP and non-ERP data in the cloud or on-prem.
• Roll-Out Faster, Easier BI Projects – Jet Analytics ERPsmarts means you can get up and running faster, rely less on IT, and reduce your need for costly technical experts and consultants.
• Enable Self-Service Reporting and Analytics – Easy, quick self-service analytics and reporting allows business users to manage and create the reports they need.

With the right digital tools, delivering the right outcomes for smarter business decisions, finance teams can offset skills shortages and position their organizations for continued growth and success, regardless of market conditions. If your organization is looking to develop reporting and analytics skills in a wider group of team members, or if you are trying to ease the burden on your team by automating manual reporting processes, schedule a demo today.