Survey: What manual tasks should companies look to automate?

One of the biggest benefits of automation is it can streamline some of your finance staff’s most time-consuming, manual tasks.

As a result, your team can devote more of their workday to strategic work, and your company can reap new savings – both in time and money.

But that’s a very general, broad benefit. What specific tasks do staffers wish they could automate and streamline? A new survey from the business and technology solution experts at Sykes set to find out.

Most detested manual tasks

Specifically, the survey asked staffers for examples of repetitive or boring tasks that they wished automation could stop them from having to do themselves.

Out of 1,500 open-ended responses, Sykes identified the most common words, such as: phone, answer, call, report, task and data.

What’s more, some typical examples of the most popular responses received included:

• answering phone calls at work
• making confirmation phone calls
• sending follow-up emails
• completing spreadsheets
• doing tedious organizing/filing
• monitoring incoming data
• filling out the same papers repeatedly, and
• tracking payments and orders.

Applying it to your company

Chances are, your finance team is familiar with some of these top headaches – and perhaps others, too. Given your company’s unique operations, it’s likely your team deals with other manual task woes not outlined in this survey.

So, it could be beneficial to survey your own finance staff. Take an approach similar to Sykes’ and gather information on which manual tasks pain your staffers the most. Are they the ones mentioned in Sykes’ survey? Are there other ones that weren’t on your radar before?

Then consider: Can your current (or any forthcoming) automation address your staff’s most tedious tasks? If not, what additional procedural or technological changes could they make to streamline them? Be sure to get more insight and ideas by asking staffers for their input, too.