In today’s competitive business environment, companies face the challenge of accomplishing more with less. If they want to thrive and survive in the market, they must gain efficiency, drive savings and provide more value than their competitors.

A growing number of companies are therefore looking to save costs on time-consuming and cost-inefficient tasks. Back office tasks perfectly fit this description and often put a heavy burden on employees.

Thankfully, back office automation can make their lives easier! With the most recent technological developments in OCR and machine learning, companies can substantially reduce the need for manual data entry, allowing employees to focus on more valuable tasks.

This blog will help you understand the concept of back office automation, explain its advantages and describe how it can transform your business!

What is back office automation?

To give you a better understanding of what back office automation is, let’s point out first what back office tasks are. Some of the most common examples of back office tasks are primarily those that deliver administrative functions such as data entry, document sorting, accounting, human resources and IT support.

In general, tasks that occur frequently, are repetitive or are labor intensive can be automated. Back office automation intends to reduce these manual processes and get work done more accurately.

What are the advantages of back office automation?

There are many advantages to implementing back office automation in your company, so we will now present to you the top 4 advantages and explain how process automation can benefit your company.

• Cost savings
• Optimize speed and accuracy
• Increased productivity
• Scalable

Cost savings

The biggest advantage of back office automation is the reduction in employee work hours. You get more efficiency for fewer costs, such as in terms of salary, but also in terms of office rent and other costs involved.

Optimize speed and accuracy

Time consuming tasks are always susceptible to errors. When using automated software, with a simple click of a button, employees will be able to work faster, and enable better and more accurate data.

Increased productivity

Computers are never sick, never late and they do not tire of a 24/7 working week. Besides that, they can perform multiple tasks at once. This allows faster workflows where employees can focus on more important tasks to the company.

Scalable

With automated software you can automatically scale your servers on demand without any additional recruiting, contracts, office space and so forth.

How back office automation can transform your business

Back office automation can transform your company in incredible ways. Tasks that include data entry, document sorting, data verification, or approval, are good examples of tasks that can be automated.

Let’s now have a good look at some practical examples of the use of back office automation.

Below, you can find 3 of the most common use cases:

• Loyalty programs
• Accounts payable solutions
• KYC processes

Loyalty programs

Loyalty campaigns offer customers extra benefits or promotions, such as a free product or discount. Here’s how it normally works: a customer buys a promotional product and sends in their receipt. The receipt has to be checked and validated by the seller, and entered into a system. After a final approval, the reward for the customer is released.

These campaigns always involve a lot of manual work and at times these processes can take days or even weeks to complete.

With an automated solution, customers can simply use their phone to take a picture of the receipt and the software does the rest of the work for you! Receipt data is automatically analyzed, interpreted, and processed in just a few seconds.

What is the result? Faster processes and happier customers are the main advantages of using an automated loyalty solution. It will also result in fewer incidents of fraud, like the acceptance of duplicate receipts.

Accounts payable solutions

Some companies process hundreds or even thousands of invoices per month. The invoices are usually checked by employees and then sent to the responsible parties who authorize payment of the requested amount. Each invoice needs to be categorized so that it is sent to the correct person for further authorization.

At the same time, all these invoices are individually checked for errors and inconsistencies. Then someone needs to make sure that they are actually authorized within the invoice due date. Once this is completed, the payment can be processed, added to the financial overview, and archived.

With the implementation of an automated solution, this process can be simplified. Once the invoices are received, they are automatically categorized and sent to the responsible person who generally authorizes the invoices. The invoice is then automatically added to the online database and the payment request is automatically sent to the finance department. Furthermore, multiple invoices can be processed at the same time and without any problems!

KYC processes

Many companies in the financial services industry are required to comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations. The requirements may differ from country to country, but customers generally have to provide a government-issued ID as proof of identity.

Some time ago, customers would go to a bank, present their ID, and sign some forms. The bank employee would then manually verify the data and enter it into the bank’s system and the customer would be confirmed as the person opening the account.

Automating the process described above can save a company a lot of time and also assets. Any data from an identity card or passport can be extracted. Usually the data is placed in a similar position on the card and supplemented with a description in several languages. This means that all data can be extracted easily and accurately.

Non-textual data can also be extracted: the photo ID, the signature, and the machine-readable zone (MRZ). This makes it much easier to confirm the customer’s identity.

The power of back office automation

Do you want to take your business to the next level? Now that you know more about back office automation, the next step is to find intelligent software that fits your business needs.

Klippa is one of the leading providers in the market and can help you with all the cases mentioned in this blog and much more.

Author: Yeelen Knegtering
Author bio: Yeelen Knegtering, CEO & Co-founder of Klippa, is passionate about developing digital products that help people to save time on administrative hassle and spend time on the things they love. With a degree in Information Technology at the University of Groningen, he started Klippa with the idea that there had to be a better way to organize and manage receipts. Now, Klippa is a document digitization company with a focus on digitizing and automating document streams for companies.