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Table of Contents
Key takeaways:
- Excel has been a staple software for finance and spend management since its invention, but as companies grow, manually processing transactions and procurement on spreadsheets becomes ineffective
- Automation workflows and tools provide several benefits to users and can eliminate the risks and costs associated with manual workflows.
- Knowing when to save time or continue to use excel is important for balancing budget and long-term gains.
It’s no secret: Finance professionals have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft Excel. It’s versatile and convenient—and simultaneously tedious and clunky. Everyone knows at least a few Excel formulas and it’s a low-cost software, making it ideal for many small and growing businesses.
But after a certain point, it can become a determinant to your business—especially your accounting workflows.
Consider this: Two-thirds of office workers use Excel once-per-hour. Average users spend about 16 minutes of every hour looking at their spreadsheets…and for heavy users the time spent on Excel was significantly higher.
It’s easy to see where this time goes with financial management. Manually recording, updating, reconciling, and closing transactions takes time. Whether you are the junior accountant listing the information or the company controller reviewing user controls, Excel is a manual process.
And in periods of growth, it’s incredibly unsustainable. For many CFOs, it’s worth wondering when it’s time to make the switch. Too soon, and you’re paying more revenue for an overpowered tool. Investing too late translates into lost revenue, spotty processes, and —depending on the software—longer training time.
In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about deciding when to automate your accounting process.
Signs to use Excel over automation
Automation should generally be considered when you:
- Are rapidly growing
- Have a lean team
- Struggle with recordkeeping or compliance due to high volume
Automating a finance department enables you to eliminate manual tasks and improve the workload for your team. However, it is possible to over-optimize and end up spending more time (and money) on accounting tools. To avoid this, it helps to weigh each task separately to determine whether manual or automation is the best path forward. It’s often helpful to focus on bottlenecks for automation and not rush the process to automate your entire workflow.
That said, let’s take a look at the top 2 signs it’s time to automate your process.
When the Task is Simple to Do in Excel
Some tasks are just easy to do using Excel, and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If you’re able to stay efficient while using Excel for certain tasks, keep doing what you’re doing!
When You Need to Collaborate with Other Excel Users
Many financial professionals rely on Excel. If your team tries to force outside collaborators to use a different system, disrupting their existing workflows, you can probably imagine how that will go over. Excel enables people to play well together in the sandbox.
When should automation be considered?
Excel’s strengths (notably its flexibility) can become weaknesses when you take it too far outside what it was designed to do. People sometimes try to get Excel to jump through hoops to work as a CRM or as a financial reporting tool and get into trouble as a result. Here’s when you should look at other tools to automate a process.
When the Spreadsheet Becomes Too Complex
If you’re a financial professional, you’ve seen them — spreadsheets that are unwieldy and outdated, if not baffling. They waste time as you try to decipher them, and they invite errors. If your spreadsheets are generating a lot of head-scratching, you’ll want to consider integrating another software tool.
When You’re Spending Too Much Time on Manual Data Entry
A surprising number of companies are manually exporting and importing data from one system to another via Excel. Not only is it difficult to prevent errors in a manual sync, it also can be incredibly time consuming. Automating the flow of data with an integration between applications can eliminate errors and boost your team’s productivity at the same time.
When You Need to Collaborate More Efficiently
Just because you need to collaborate with others who use Excel doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of what automation tools can offer. You need a solution that works with Excel — that allows your team and your collaborators to continue using Excel for the tasks it’s great at, while allowing your team to operate more efficiently.
Examples that Translate These Guidelines to Real Life
So, what do these general guidelines look like in the real world? Here are a few examples that offer insight.
The main benefits of automation
The primary benefits of automation mirror the downsides of manual processing—namely, lost time and low visibility. These improvements offer a clear return on investment by reducing inefficiencies and overhead.
According to the Ardent Partner’s 2025 State of ePayables report, 49% of finance professionals said that approvals take too long, 31% stated concern of fraud risk, and 24% mentioned that lack of visibility continues to be a challenge. All of these obstacles are rooted in manual workflows.
The right tech stack and automation tools decimate these issues.
For example, it’s possible to automate policy spend enforcement. This both reduces time spent on expense reporting while boosting compliance measures, limiting fraud, and increasing transaction visibility.
According to the same report, companies using best-in-class automation tools may experience per-invoice processing costs that are 79% lower and faster than their peers. In addition, their invoice exception rates are 47% lower than the rest of the marketplace
3 finance processes benefit the most from automation
While you can automate a significant portion of finance management, there are three processes that benefit the most from this process:
- Procure-to-Pay
Employees waste time creating the reports and attaching receipts, and the accounting department wastes time going back to employees whose spreadsheets are disorganized and difficult to navigate or who didn’t provide adequate information.
Automated finance solutions eliminate the need for expense reporting. Procurement software, like Teampay, integrates into an employee's existing workflows, removing human error from the equation. It works by issuing secure virtual cards, which employees use for all expenses, and it automatically reconciles all transaction data into your accounting software.
- Close Checklist
The monthly close is a complex process. Accounting teams often rely on Excel checklists to make sure everything is getting done properly. But when several team members are involved, the process is complicated. And since team members have no way of knowing when others have completed their portions of the process, the close starts to get messy and often doesn’t complete in time.
Tools like FloQast connect your process, people, documents, and reconciliations in the cloud, allowing team members to see who’s working on what and which steps in the process have been finished. FloQast integrates with your Excel workbooks to automate the reconciliations process, eliminating the time previously spent correcting errors. You’ll also know if you’re on track or falling behind with a real-time, month-end close status dashboard, and you’ll get email alerts for unreconciled items, so nothing falls through the cracks.
- Reconciliations
Excel works well for reconciliations in the majority of cases. If a specific reconciliation is particularly complex, you may want to use a dedicated reconciliation module in your ERP. Deferred Revenue is a great example. But there’s no reason to abandon Excel for reconciliations that are easy to do in Excel. Close management software works with Excel to allow you to benefit from automation while still using Excel for core functions like reconciliations.
Take your procurement to the next level
Excel still rules for many tasks, and it’s an important tool for many financial professionals across a variety of industries and functions. But you can absolutely take advantage of what automation can do for your team, and probably at an earlier stage than you think.
Procurement is one area where it can be good to automate early. Identifying, managing, and paying suppliers can rapidly become unsustainable on manual spreadsheets—but this is a critical area for identifying leaks and ensuring compliance.
Discover how an automated procurement process can transform your business today.
