The contemporary corporate financial functioning landscape needs prudent approval workflow and documentation workflow to maintain strong compliance and resistive control. According to 2023 Thompson Reuters’s Global Compliance Report, among 350 total respondents, 45% said they did not monitor the cost of regulatory compliance across their organizations. Due to this, low staff morale is becoming a conduct risk for many firms, and the potential for errors leading to more widespread non-compliance or manipulation by staff is deemed to increase in the future. The main aim lies in eliminating financial risks, improving efficiency levels, and complying with the corporate finance regulatory frameworks.
Chief Financial Officers are the prime enablers who are provisioned to manage and facilitate optimal approval and the documentation of workflows. Established comprehensively, it aids businesses in achieving their set objectives. The following article explores how CFOs can navigate organizational approval & documentation to serve financial efficiency to their company.
Assessment of the present approval and documentation processes
Identification of the bottlenecks and inefficiencies
Approval Workflow optimization can’t ever be achieved if there exist process-based inefficiencies. In such cases, the one thing to do is to discover the holdups and bottlenecks in which approvals get late. Critical analysis of every step of the workflow is mandatory, as it shows whether:
- The tasks are done manually or are automated.
- The unnecessary steps of approval are identified and can be eliminated.
- Communication channels to facilitate the reduction of errors and delays can be optimized, categorized, and enhanced.
- Disadvantages based on the usage of resources, such as staff, necessities, or software, that contribute to inefficiencies can be eradicated.
Evaluation of compliance and readiness among the audits
Present day organizational documentation approval workflows must be subjected to rigorous analysis to verify effective financial rules, regulations, and standards compliance, similar to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) or the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).
The Indian corporate finance genre also consists of similar acts and standards, the famous ones being the Indian Accounting Standards (Ind AS), Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Guidelines, and Insurance Regulatory and the Development Authority of India (IRDAI) Regulations. The guidelines and regulations mostly cover aspects of risk management, financial reporting, corporate governance, and enhanced accounting practices. Much of these apply to both banking/non-banking financial companies (NBFCs).
The crux of these standards mention formulating processes that must involve:
- Critical, cross-checked documentation and collection of evidential resources for maintaining detailed records of compliance, policies, and security strategies.
- An updated, transparent, and legitimate audit trail involves proper auditing regulation establishment for compliance-based processes to develop internal and external audits.
CFOs should ensure fully-fledged risk management, whereby potential financial threats are identified and appropriate controls are implemented to counter them. They are required to ensure that their financial reporting is accurate and as transparent as possible, and is presented according to the requirements of regulators to maintain investor confidence.
It requires proper policies and consequent monitoring mechanisms to ensure accountability of actions within organizations in adherence to ethical behavior. It ensures periodic auditing of these workflows and continuous improvement, thus preserving integrity and efficiency in finance operations.
Design Of an Optimal Approval System and Workflow Documentation
Designing clear and concise roles and responsibilities
As a Chief Financial Officer, if it is one’s sole motive to cut down approval workflow delays, setting clear responsibilities and rules for every stakeholder within any approval process is required. By pointing out the ones who are responsible for every task, one can:
- Reduce the percentage of delays by ensuring effective movement of the documents.
- Decrease the risks of acting without authorization.
- Improve in-house team accountability.
Establishment of approval hierarchy and thresholds
Developing a detailed and well-structured approval hierarchy is important which links to the financial policy of the organization. Critically defining the approval workflow thresholds is necessary to ensure:
- Important transactions are monitored and pass through extensive authorization levels.
- Routinely made transactions are efficiently processed without any holdups/delays.
Incorporation of digital documentation and archives
Organizational heads, especially financial foremen, need to shift from traditional ways to digital means of documentation and archiving to sustain modern-day financial operations.
Here’s how digital documentation, such as e-invoicing can help untangle your business workflow:
Digital documents are much easier and more effective to store. Effective data storage and database management massively assists in financial data retrieval anytime, anywhere, at will through just a few finger taps. It also helps reduce risks of loss and damage of physical hardcopy documents. A strong document management system implementation can aid in:
- Secure organization-wide centralized data storage.
- Ease of access.
- Swift and easy document retrieval.
How Technology and Tools Ease Up Approval Workflow and Documentation
Tools for automating the workflows
Workflow automation can effectively help improve workflow efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and decreasing the requirement for manual interventions. There exists a multitude of tools to help with organizational workflow automation.
Three of the most popular ones are:
- Kissflow Workflow: Ideal for non-technical or novice users.
- Qntrl: Facilitates cross-functional processes.
- Monday.com: Cloud-based, schemaless architecture allowing adaptive workflow management
All of these tools and more help ease approval processes, reducing paperwork and thereby ensuring swifter turnaround times.
Digital Signature Solution
Digital document signer solutions, similar to Adobe Sign and PandaDoc, provide secure and effective methods for handling document signing, review online, and thereby approval.
Such solutions help ensure that every regulatory norm within organizational documents, such as employee onboarding, NDAs, pay slips, inventory payouts, etc., is legally bound and widely recognized. It helps speed up the approvals process, making it very transparent and reliable.
Many of such solutions offer diverse integration options via APIs and document signing gateways. Such aids in technical necessities make it easier for organizations to utilize digital signatures as a medium, fastening approval workflow rates.
Cloud-Based Document Management System
Solutions like Microsoft SharePoint and DocuWare help provide comprehensive document management benefits. They ensure that every document is safely stored and readily accessible from anywhere and at any time, with added cloud-native access and advantages.
The implementation of a cloud-based management system helps in offering several advantages, which involve:
- Cost-effectiveness, often following a pay-as-you-go format of pricing.
- Improved and efficient collaboration as everything is cloud-stored, instantly accessible, and siloed.
- Enhanced security via data encryption and multi-factor authentication to protect and safeguard sensitive information.
- Swift updates and patching are due to cloud-server connectivity; therefore, it performs better.
Change Management Tactics to Ensure Workflow Implementation
Change is the only constant. Managing change is key to succeeding in workflow augmentation. Change management frameworks such as Kotter’s 8-Step Model or Lewin’s 3-Stage Model dictate that businesses are bound to face micro/macro-environmental change resistances from time to time. But such is solvable.
Here’s how to make use of the Lewin’s 3-step model for a smoother workflow implementation process in any organization:
Unfreeze:
- Drive change by highlighting deficits of the current workflows.
- Communicate the need for new financial systems to stakeholder groups; handle resistance and ready the team.
Change:
- Adopt new financial workflows and systems, providing adequate training, support, and resources so employees can better change their processes.
- Encourage the needed feedback and make adjustments accordingly.
Refreeze:
- Stabilize new workflows by firmly establishing them as standard practice.
- Reinforce and sustain the changes made, tending to the new workflow through regularly monitoring and updating, and reporting them across the organization.
- Celebrate early successes to build confidence and commitment to the new system.
Such structured approach ensures a smooth transition and maximizes the chances of successful implementation. The most important tactics involve clarity in communication to elaborate the advantages and shifts for all stakeholders. Additional maneuvers involve training and upskilling the workforce to make them tech-ready. Close governance of implemented systems and strategies also helps promptly address complexities and workflow adjustments/pivots in case of holdups/resistances to change.
How To Rapidly Measure and Enhance Documentation & Approval Workflows
Having a check on the performance of the workflows
Proactive decision-making should be the heart of a Chief Financial Officer’s capabilities. This can be done by establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring workflow efficiency, with specific focus on:
- Turnaround times for approval/approval workflow.
- Mistake rates.
- Compliance levels among the workforce.
All the aforementioned metrics provide critical insights into workflow performance, which one can track using visualization software like Microsoft Power BI or Tableau. Such can aid with periodic tracking of KPI metrics, thereby helping identify and improve weak aspects.
Rapid Enhancement
Adopting an approach that inherits continuous improvements ensures that your workflow remains efficient. Regularly checking the processes, gathering user feedback, and staying updated with the breakneck tech improvements and regulatory metamorphosis are key to increasing documentation and approval workflow rates. Integrating feedback loops by collecting and analyzing the feedback from the audit and security and making iterative enhancements based on the feedback received can help satiate organizational objectives.
Effective Methods for Implementation of Approval Workflows
Processes used to standardize
A standardized process used to document the routing, signing, and storage helps make the system consistent. Such methods include:
- Establishment of proper criteria to approve for streamlining decision-making and minimize subjective judgments.
- Maintaining hierarchical clarity, and structuring the folders and metadata to avoid the usage of wrong versions of the file in the final documentation steps.
Automating the Follow-Ups
Automate the follow-ups to ensure on-time action. Automated reminders and real-time visibility in approval status aid finance teams in prioritizing their tasks, ensuring efficient resource allocation.
Boosting Signatures
A single solution-based digital approval process can help swiftly send documents from one signer to another. It boosts up the signing process, ensuring approvals are developed at a faster rate.
Storing the documents through digital means
Digital storage within protected databases safeguards potential data loss or softcopy destruction, enabling secure document upkeep and further improving document management and retrieval.
Extra tips to improve approval workflow:
- Utilize concurrent workflows in which the documents are sent to the approvers rapidly. It minimizes the total approval workflow time and integrates the responses into a final draft.
- Reviewers should be limited to efficient stakeholders to reduce unnecessary reviews, boosting the approvals process.
- Using pre-approved content (previously approved texts) helps ensure consistency and reduce repetitive document reviews.
- Integration with CRM tools, messaging platforms, etc., helps in seamless sharing and trouble-free workflow enhancements.
Conclusion
Providing the finance team with an effective approval workflow system and documentation process is important to achieve operational excellence. Chief Financial Officers improve control effectiveness and compliance in finance operations by assessing current workflows, developing optimal processes, utilizing technology, and implementing efficient change management tactics.
Rapid monitoring and enhancement can help form robust and short-tailed, which, in contrast, supports organizational sustenance and long-term success. Workflow optimization is not a one-time effort. It’s a continuous process. Regular feedback from the finance teams and stakeholders can help provide critical
insights and identify scopes of improvement. Staying well-informed about the best tools and technologies can offer further ways to streamline approval workflow processes.
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