By James Thomas and Ryan Courtade

It’s nearing the end of the year, and you probably plan to review core business functions. Most look at marketing, operations, and human resources. One key area, though, is often overlooked in a business’s year-end review: accounts payable and financial technology.

Why look at this segment? Here’s why:

• It often accounts for wasted time and lost money.
• CFOs don’t have time to get caught up in the line-by-line detail of bookkeeping.
• CPAs need to have a reliable, easily accessible system to advise from a tax perspective.

Today’s CFOs need to focus on the future: developing plans, strategies, and budgets around objectives. How can you effectively do that if you are stuck in the day-to-day minutiae of sorting through bills and invoices?

If you have a CPA handling these responsibilities, have you ever thought about how else they could better spend their time? What if they weren’t digging through papers and compiling data? What if, instead, they were focused on helping grow the business?

Here are five key questions you need to ask at year’s end to benchmark your financial practices.

How much time do you spend on bookkeeping?

Some businesses spend 20 or more hours per week on bookkeeping. That’s a lot of time doing something that does not contribute to the top line of the business. Using expense management software would allow your CPA – or you as a CFO – to focus on more productive tasks.

This could take the form of learning new skills, thus attracting more customers and ultimately making more money. It is a growth approach. A stagnant approach is one where you are stuck sorting through bills and paperwork.

How much money is lost in receipts?

It’s easy to misplace or lose receipts. Technology-based solutions make it easy to avoid this mistake by storing everything digitally. Plus, using this kind of technology makes sense with the emergence of digital workplaces. More people than ever before are working remotely across different devices. Automated expense management tools empower employees to work productively and securely – whenever and wherever.

We know an architect that uses an expense-management tool. During the first month, he saved a total of $700. Before the tool, he was losing reimbursements and receipts; now he simply takes a picture of a receipt and uploads it into a system that codes and organizes it for different clients.

With so many receipts likely floating around for different clients, it’s hard to keep track of them and know which one is for which client. If you know how to take a picture with your smartphone, you’re ready to go. Expense management tools can be that easy.

Are you able to see every bill you owe and when they are due?

It’s always astonishing to learn how many small businesses can’t answer this question. Visibility is key to effectively managing cash flow. With expense management software, you can see all your expenses on a single dashboard. You can know exactly what you owe and when, without having to look in multiple places.

Most start-up businesses fail because they do not properly manage their cash flow. When business owners pay out more than they are putting in, the need for visibility grows even stronger. Use smart business technology to track where and how you are spending money.

Are there opportunities to save money with different vendors?

Not looking at the bigger picture of how money is being spent is easy to do. Imagine a scenario where your bookkeeper, no longer spending a bulk of his or her time entering data, can review your vendors and how you spend money with them. Would you rather pay a bookkeeper to perform data entry, or would you rather have them analyze this data to figure out how to save the business money? Everyone wants to save money, but not everyone knows the best and easiest way to do it.

At this point, the bookkeeper is moving into analysis. Who wouldn’t want that for their business?

What do you spend on preparing your annual tax documents?

Yearly taxes can be a pain, especially for small-business owners. The process doesn’t have to be complicated, however. An automated expense system changes the game. Expenses and invoices are nicely organized and stored in a systematic way, and you will no longer need to dig around for loose paperwork that you forgot you needed. And this in mind: you could be one of the 700,000 small businesses audited by the IRS every year.

Essentially, your business has about a 15% chance of being audited each year. Get the right technology so that you will have a much less stressful tax season.

How did you answer these questions? If you think you may be behind where you should be, use this self-analysis as an opportunity to review your systems.

Automated expense management technology can be beneficial in many different ways. It can save you time and money and make your life – especially at year-end – a heck of a lot easier. Now that will bring a happy new year to any CFO or CPA.

James Thomas is the founder and CEO of Itemize Corp., and Ryan Courtade is vice president of revenue operations. Itemize Corp. is a payments data company whose technology transforms receipts and invoices into structured information for commercial card data enhancement, accounts payable management, and employee expense tracking.

Learn more about how the roles of corporate CFOs are changing.

You can also sign up for weekly professional and technical updates in PICPA's blogs, podcasts, and discussion board topics by completing the form here.