Automating Your Finance and Reporting Processes

So far, we’ve covered how to automate three essential business functions, namely, marketing, sales, and operations. Having efficient processes in those three areas directly impacts your finance processes as more leads are converted into sales, which are then smoothly served, which means that there are more accounting transactions to handle. Automating your finance processes, therefore, means that as you scale, you can handle larger volumes of transactions quicker and more accurately, thereby giving you access to real-time financial performance data.

Once you’ve got a better handle on your accounting processes, you can focus on getting better visibility of the higher-quality data coming from all aspects of your business by automating reporting processes. Having access to this up-to-date and accurate data allows you to proactively gain insights into business performance when you need to, without much manual intervention...

Technical requirements

To make the most of the content in this chapter, you will need access to a Zapier account. The Zapier Free plan will be required for you to create single-step workflows and use Zapier’s pre-built templates. The Zapier Starter plan will be required for you to use Premium apps and to create multi-step workflows.

You can get access to the Zap templates used in this chapter at https://bit.ly/zapier-book. Using the templates will help you to visualize how the process works.

An introduction to automating your finance processes with Zapier

Many businesses struggle with the drudgery of keeping their financial records up to date. In fact, bookkeeping is one of the tasks that many business owners leave to the last minute if they don’t have a dedicated bookkeeper or accounting team. We would like to think that most businesses are now completely paperless in their approach to keeping their finances under control; however, sometimes, you can’t avoid having paper copies of purchases and expenses. And even when a business can move to a completely digital accounting management system by receiving all purchase invoices from suppliers by email, using expense management tools that allow you to take photographs of your expenses and purchases, and creating digital sales invoices and sending them to customers by email, the process of recording all of this data in one place can still be a manual, repetitive, time-consuming, and extremely error-prone process...

An introduction to automating your reporting processes with Zapier

Now that you have taken the time to simplify and automate your marketing, sales, operations, and finance processes, it’s crucial to understand how all of these key areas perform against key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. Businesses can only make good decisions if they have up-to-date and accurate reporting information to hand. If this information is available instantly, you won’t have to spend hours downloading and manipulating data to present it to key decision-makers; they will have top-level critical data on demand.

With advances in technology, businesses no longer have to rely on hand-produced bar graphs and charts to visualize business performance data. Spreadsheet tools have become advanced reporting tools in themselves, allowing complex calculations and data manipulation. Many of the apps that we use for various business functions have their own reporting modules. which enable businesses...

Where to start with automating your finance and reporting processes with Zapier

It is always good to do some pre-work before your start automating your processes. In Chapter 2, Preparing to Automate Your Processes, and Chapter 3, Building Your First Automated Workflow (Zap), we covered a few important points that will help you when you are strategizing your finance and reporting workflows; they are as follows:

1. Map out your finance and reporting processes: If you don’t have a clear idea of how your finance and reporting processes work with all your tools, follow the steps in the Simplifying your processes and assessing what can be automated section in Chapter 2, Preparing to Automate Your Processes, to visually map out your processes so that you have a high-level overview of how your tasks work with your existing software.
2. List your finance and reporting tools: Make a list of all the finance and reporting tools and services that you use in your business to achieve...

Automating accounting processes with the Xero integration

Xero is a popular cloud-based accounting package used by small- and medium-sized businesses. With Xero, you can manage your accounts payable and accounts receivable processes, as well as manage expense claims and payroll and track inventory projects. You can create and send quotes, sales invoices, and purchase orders, and you can comprehensively report on your financials. You can also connect payment processing solutions such as PayPal, GoCardless, and Stripe to help you get paid faster by your customers. The ability to connect bank feeds to Xero automates part of the transaction reconciliation process, removing the need to manually import bank statements and transaction line entries. Depending on your location, you can submit tax returns and pay bills straight from Xero. Xero also allows you to handle multiple currencies.

Xero natively integrates with hundreds of other apps to allow you to connect other parts of your business...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the different types of finance and reporting processes that can be automated with Zapier and we explored some examples of workflows used with some common applications. First, we got an overview of the types of finance processes that can be automated with Zapier. Then, we covered the types of reporting processes that can be automated with Zapier. After that, we explored where to start with automating finance and reporting processes with Zapier. Finally, we discussed how to automate accounting processes with the Xero integration.

You now know how to automate your finance and reporting processes with Zapier and, specifically, finance processes involving the Xero integration.

In the next chapter, you will learn some practical tips, tricks, and best practices for enhancing your success when using Zapier in your business.

Questions

1. What type of finance processes can be automated using Zapier?
2. What type of reporting processes can be automated using Zapier?