Automating accounting: how to save work hours in your company
· 5 min read
A mid-sized company can process between 200 and 2,000 invoices per month. If each invoice requires 5 minutes of manual work — reading, classification, journal entry, filing — that means between 17 and 167 monthly hours spent solely on recording invoices. Accounting automation is not a luxury: it is an operational necessity.
Where is the most time lost in accounting?
Before automating, it is worth identifying the bottlenecks. In most companies, the most time-consuming processes are: manual entry of supplier invoices, bank reconciliation at the end of the month, preparation of reports for management, and generation of payment batches.
Supplier invoice automation with OCR and AI
Automatic invoice reading using optical character recognition (OCR) combined with AI is the most impactful advance of recent years in accounting. LucIA Scann, integrated into ERPCloud, automatically extracts all relevant fields from any invoice — in PDF, image or email format — and converts them into a proposed journal entry. The accuracy rate exceeds 95% on standard invoices, which drastically reduces the volume of review work.
Automatic payments and payment batches
Once invoices are recorded and validated, ERPCloud can automatically generate payment batches according to each supplier's conditions: due date, payment method, bank account. The finance manager only needs to approve the batch; the system does the rest.
Automatic management reporting
Management reports — sales evolution, margins by business line, budget comparison — should be available in real time, not prepared manually each month. With a well-configured ERP, the management team can access this data autonomously without always needing the finance team as an intermediary.
The result: more time for what matters
Companies that automate their accounting processes with ERPCloud typically report savings of between 30 and 80 hours per month depending on transaction volume. That time can be redirected towards financial analysis, strategic planning, or simply reducing the team's workload, improving their satisfaction and retention.
How much time is your team losing on manual accounting? We help you calculate it and reduce it →