When we were all sent home in the March of 2020 to work virtually, most of us had never had to rely on some of the digital ways of life that we now use every day. Zoom, Cisco WebEx, and Microsoft Teams meetings changed the way that we interact with each other.
Meetings were extremely awkward at first: cameras on or off, relying on your poor at-home Wifi, or trying to keep your children at bay while you were presenting. Now that it’s time to head back to the office, some of those problems go away while new ones arise. How can we focus on the positives that have come out of this unique situation? While most of us were complaining about staying inside, others were changing the way we leverage financial technology.
As I said, some of us struggled to adjust socially, but how about how we operated as businesses? Suddenly the need to understand and utilize technology became increasingly important, especially in a back-office role. If your company still ran on paper copies of purchase orders and invoices, your job suddenly became much more complex.
You had to learn a new way to organize and efficiently manage the way you did work in an entirely new way. Now that it has been over a year of staying at home, you are adjusted to the way you handle work in a virtual environment and are struggling to cope with the realities of coming back to the office. Will you go back to the way things were? Struggling to sort paper copies and following endless paper trails for days at a time? Or will you use your experience in a virtual environment to continue to innovate?
While you may have been honing your skills at manually reconciling purchase orders and invoices, there is a better way to operate in a virtual way. You may have enjoyed your time doing things virtually, it may have even cut down on costs of your business and opened up free time to explore other opportunities as a business professional, but there are still ways to improve.
Many businesses and companies have found that utilizing financial technology in their AP/AR offices completely changed the way their back-office operates. You are able to instantly reconcile data and eliminate the need for chasing paper trails. Think about how long it takes you to manually find a missing purchase order or invoice and think about doing that in a fraction of the time.
Not only are you saving time in your role, but you can also now leverage that time and energy elsewhere. You no longer have to be a paper pusher in the back office, you can use your financial acumen to transform yourself into a business leader. You may have found that switching your business from a paper-heavy setting to a business that runs on spreadsheets is fast, but the next step to innovating your business is utilizing financial technology.
The use of this financial technology will not only help you as you perform your daily actions, but you will also be able to put your business to the next level. The percentage of businesses using financial technology is still low, but growing rapidly. Traditionally, only huge companies and corporations were able to afford this type of advancement in their technology, but now you can use these systems on a smaller scale.
Do not be afraid to push your business to the next level and move past your competition. The time to switch is now while we are moving back into a more in-person setting. Use financial technology to your benefit and show your executive leadership that there are more improvements to be made in your business.