Finance teams get a bad rap sometimes. People think they are just number crunchers. Boring people in boring offices pushing paper around. That old picture is fading fast. The best teams today are anything but boring. They move fast. They spot trends before anyone else. They actually help the business make better decisions. Automation is the secret sauce. It takes away the grind and leaves room for the good stuff. Here is how to build a team that runs like a machine but thinks like humans.
Start With the Right Foundation
You cannot build a high-performance team on broken tools. That is just a fact. If your people spend hours cutting and pasting between spreadsheets, they have no energy left for real thinking. Look at your accounts payable process first. That is usually the biggest time suck. Different automation tools take different approaches. Some focus on artificial intelligence that learns your coding patterns. Others emphasize portal-based supplier communication. You might want to see how Esker AP automation stacks up against Medius if you are evaluating options. One uses machine learning to match purchase orders automatically. The other has strong invoice capture from day one. The right choice depends on where your team struggles most. Pick the foundation that actually solves your specific headaches.
Kill the Manual Data Entry First
Manual data entry is slow. It is boring. It is full of typos. Automation fixes this instantly. Modern tools read invoices the moment they arrive. They pull out vendor names and invoice numbers. They grab line items and totals. Your team just reviews and clicks approve. That is it. Hours of work turn into minutes. Your people stop feeling like typists. They start feeling like finance professionals again. Morale goes up. Mistakes go down. It is a win all around.
Build Workflows That Run Themselves
Good workflows do not need constant babysitting. Set them up once and let them run. Define approval rules based on dollar amounts. Small invoices go to team leads automatically. Big ones hit the controller’s queue. If someone sits on an approval too long, the system sends a reminder. Then it escalates to their boss. You are not chasing people anymore. The software does the chasing for you. This keeps things moving even when you are busy with other stuff. It also stops bottlenecks before they happen.
Give Your Team Real Visibility
Nothing frustrates a finance person like not knowing where things stand. Is that invoice approved yet? Did the vendor get paid? Why is this PO still open? Without good tools, finding answers takes forever. With automation, you see everything instantly. Dashboards show pending approvals. Reports highlight unusual spending. Alerts flag invoices about to go late. Your team stops hunting for information. They just look at the screen and know. That confidence changes how they work. They answer questions fast. They spot problems early. They look like heroes instead of bottlenecks.
Make Space for Strategic Thinking
Here is the magic part. When you remove all the boring work, your team gets brain space back. They can look at spending patterns across the company. They can find vendors charging too much. They can negotiate better contracts. They can actually help department heads plan budgets instead of just telling them they overspent. This is where finance becomes valuable. This is where you stop being the “no” department and start being the “how” department. Automation does not replace your people. It lifts them up. It lets them do the work they actually signed up for.
Connect Everything Together
A high-performance team does not work in silos. Your finance tools should talk to your ERP. They should talk to your bank. They should connect with procurement and sales. When everything links up, data flows automatically. No more exporting and importing. No more reconciling differences between systems. Invoices match to POs without help. Payments post back automatically. Your team spends zero time making systems agree. They just trust the numbers and move on. That trust is priceless. It frees them up completely.
Train Your People on the New Way
Do not just drop software on your team and walk away, these new tools will only work if your people actually use them. Show them how it makes their life easier. Let them play with it. Answer their questions. Find the person who hates it most and win them over first. When the skeptics come around, everyone else follows. Make sure they know this is not about replacing them. It is about freeing them. It is about making their job suck less. When they get that, they embrace the change. They even start finding new ways to use the tools you never thought of.
Keep Evolving Over Time
Automation is not a one-and-done thing. New features come out. Your business changes. New problems pop up. Keep looking at your workflows. Ask your team what still annoys them. Maybe a new integration can fix something. Maybe a rule needs updating. Maybe you are ready for the next level of automation like predictive analytics or fraud detection. Stay curious. Keep tweaking. The teams that get comfortable and stop improving are the ones that fall behind. Keep pushing forward. Keep making things better. That is how you stay high-performance for the long haul.
