A company’s integration of technology can be a deciding factor in whether employees stick around. It can also, of course, impact performance. New data suggests accounting teams may be falling by the wayside as their companies push for greater technology integration and growth.
Zuora, a recurring revenue software provider, recently surveyed more than 500 accounting and finance leaders for their 2023 state of revenue accounting report. Almost 7 in 10 surveyed (68%) said they don’t have the right technology to address the growing demands from their counterparts in sales, marketing, operations, and other departments.
Pressures Increasing
Data shows that many accounting teams, already slowed by the industry talent shortage, feel they can’t keep up with the pace of their workflows. Over three-quarters (76%) of all respondents told Zuora they are experiencing increasing pressure from their business to support new go-to-market models and product pricing. An identical percentage said these new models are growing in complexity.
While the pressures affect workflows, accounting teams said the biggest thing holding them back was technology. More specifically, just under three quarters (74%) said that although they believe their teams need to focus more on analytics and business partnering, a lack of automation prevents that.
Data Confidence is Low
Accurate data can determine the difference between an accurate and inaccurate forecasting model. Access to quality data is a severe issue for most accounting teams surveyed. Less than half (44%) of all respondents said they were highly confident in their revenue data.
“Data is the biggest challenge,” Jeff Johnson, executive director at Ernst & Young told Zuora. “We frequently observe upstream systems inadequately capture the data required for the revenue accounting process and often inconsistently use the data captured upstream. This leads to manual interventions by the revenue accountants to collect, validate, and correct the upstream data to perform revenue accounting accurately.”
Johnson added that “the lack of systems expertise for the contract-to-revenue process is a frequent obstacle in improving data quality and automating the revenue accounting process.”
The Case for Automation
Whether they are bogged down by manual processes, trying to free up time for growing business needs, or trying to lessen workloads, most accounting teams are pushing for more automation. Over half (53%) of finance and accounting leaders said the lack of automation is hurting their productivity because they waste time on manual, repetitive tasks. Seventy-four percent said their team must perform manual interventions on a daily basis to process transactions.
While enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems were supposed to allay some of these problems, they present their come with their own headaches. Sixty percent of the accounting and finance leaders said their ERP revenue models do not fully support business requirements, even with some element of customization.
A higher percentage (65%) said these models were more expensive than anticipated, and nearly eight in 10 (79%) said their team still uses spreadsheets to supplement their ERP revenue models.