For financial services firms, four processes can take too long: processing supplier invoices, reconciling bank accounts, recording month-end accruals, and allocating shared overhead across entities each month.
Everyone agrees they should be automated. Nobody agrees on which one comes first.
This is the question finance automation raises for most financial services firms. The tools can handle all four processes, but starting in the wrong place can turn a small error into one that repeats every period.
The usual instinct is to start where the most hours are lost. In financial services, a better guide is where mistakes are most likely to be caught.
A process is ready to automate when it meets four criteria.
It Runs Often
Daily or weekly work gives the team enough volume to see the benefit quickly, and enough repetition to spot problems early.
The Rules Can Be Written Down
If the team can describe each decision in plain words, such as who approves what and which entity owns which cost, the system can apply those rules consistently.
Errors are caught before any payment is made or anything is sent outside the firm
A review or approval step should stand between the automated work and a payment, an investor report, or a regulatory filing.
The Data Is Clean and Someone Owns It
Vendors, entities, and fund codes need to be accurate, and one named person should be responsible for the process once it is live. When a system makes even simple rules hard to apply, that is one of the signs you have outgrown your accounting system.
Accounts Payable Comes First
Supplier invoices arrive constantly, follow approval rules the firm already has, and pass through a payment release step where mistakes can be stopped.
In financial services, routing matters more than purchase order matching.
Legal, audit, and administration fees often arrive without a purchase order, so the important rules are which entity or fund owns each invoice and who may approve it.
Changes to a supplier’s bank details need their own control. They should be confirmed through contact details already on file, never through the details in the request itself.
Family offices often begin in the same place, with payables and routine ledger entries, as described in Sage Intacct for family offices.
Bank Matching Comes Next
Matching rules can clear routine items by amount, date, and reference, leaving only the exceptions for a named reviewer.
The rules themselves then become a control. In Sage Intacct, a change to a matching rule applies to future transactions, so rule changes deserve the same approval and logging as any other control change.
Recurring Entries Follow
Accruals and prepaid expenses have stable rules and are easy to check against the prior period, which makes them a natural third step.
Allocations Come Last
An allocation rule can be internally consistent and still be wrong. Nothing downstream will flag it.
Once the rules are documented, approved, and reviewed whenever an entity is added, automation can handle the mechanics well.
The same four criteria can produce a different order in regulated businesses.
Banks Often Start With Clearing Accounts
Suspense and clearing accounts are expected to be cleared quickly and regularly reviewed.
Matching those items is frequent, rule-based, and easy to check, so for many banks it ranks ahead of supplier invoices..
Insurers Often Start With Agent and Broker Balances
For insurers, balances with agents and brokers become a problem when differences are left unreconciled for months.
Reconciling those balances, along with recurring commission entries, moves to the front of the list, with claims-related vendor invoices following once approval limits are mapped.
Artificial intelligence (AI) helps most at the start and end of a process, such as reading invoices, suggesting how to code them, and flagging transactions that look unusual.
In Sage Intacct, for example, the AP Automation feature can create draft bills from incoming invoices and flag anomalies such as unusual amounts or unfamiliar vendor email addresses. These flags are informational. They do not block posting, so someone still needs to review them.
That is why AI output should feed an approval step rather than replace it, a point we also make in our post on AI workflow automation.
Reviews and approvals are there to catch errors before any payment is made or anything is sent outside the firm. The effectiveness of these controls should guide the order of automation: start with processes that have clear rules, then expand according to the firm’s needs and priorities.
For tasks requiring professional judgment, such as accounting estimates, automation can gather and prepare the information, but decisions should generally remain with people.
The goal is not to automate as many steps as possible. It is to make each process faster while keeping it easy to review and explain.
Which Finance Tasks Should Stay Manual?
Tasks that depend on judgment, such as accounting estimates, valuation inputs, fee waivers, and disputed invoices, should usually stay with people. Automation can still gather and prepare the information they need.
Does Finance Automation Weaken Segregation of Duties?
Not when the system enforces it. Workflows can be set up so the person who creates a vendor or a rule also cannot approve its payments or changes, and user access should be regularly reviewed.
How Can a Firm Tell Whether Automation Is Working?
Record a baseline before starting, including processing time, the number of exceptions, and manual corrections each month. Comparing the same measures after the pilot shows whether the process has improved or the workload has simply shifted to another stage or team.
Ready to find out how finance automation could help your firm?
At Forgestik, we help financial services firms automate their finance processes with powerful cloud-based ERP solutions like Sage Intacct. Schedule a free consultation with one of our experts to learn how to automate your processes while maintaining approval controls and audit trails.
Learn more by exploring the Sage Intacct solution.