If you manage a finance team (and even more specifically, a revenue team), one of your biggest challenges may be employee burnout, turnover, and attrition of top talent. When you have driven, intelligent, out of the box thinkers that worked hard in college to earn their finance or accounting degree spending time in spreadsheets, it can be a bit underwhelming. Spreadsheets that are so big, half their time is spent troubleshooting and waiting for their new formula or pivot table to complete while their laptop sounds like a jet engine about to take off.

These employees are the type who love spreadsheets and use Excel for all their own personal needs. However, that doesn’t mean that they want to spend all working hours in a spreadsheet too. I remember one of my least favorite tasks as a revenue analyst. My manager at the time approached me and said “You’re going to hate doing this every month, you’re going to think it’s a waste of time, but it has to be done.”

This was the dreaded “deal linking exercise.” Yes, it was as menial as it sounds. I would spend hours sifting through a BI pull of data determining which sales orders needed to be linked for revenue recognition purposes (step 1 of ASC 606 to my nerd friends!). The most exciting part of this task is that when I was done sifting through the data in one way, I would get to sort the data another way and sift through it again. And again. And again.

I despised this with the passion of a thousand #REF errors and wondered, is this really what I went to school for?

Revenue Automation

Fast forward to 2021, and there is no reason your team’s collective brain power should be spent on things that can and should be automated. Revenue automation solutions, while they may have been “new” 15 years ago, are now the foremost way top finance teams are managing their revenue.

• Is it a manual task?
• Is it repeatable?
• Is it a task that requires no judgment?

If you answered yes, it’s time to automate that task and free your employees so they can focus on value-add activities for the business. Once the menial tasks are automated, you can uplevel your team to focus on being a partner to your CFO, working alongside sales on deal reviews to ensure revenue optimization, and utilizing that system to produce meaningful analysis that can be used to grow the business.

Once you’ve elevated your team to be strategic partners to the business; you’ve now created value that is recognized not only by your leadership team, but also by the team that’s been upleveled– congratulations, you’ve just created an ideal work environment for those bright minds.

Want to learn more? Reach out to Neocol today.