In early April, the crew of Artemis II officially broke the record for human spaceflight distance, reaching 252,756 miles from Earth. It was an inspiring moment celebrated around the globe, a milestone that pointed toward even greater accomplishments in the future.
“At NASA, we dare to reach higher, explore farther, and achieve the impossible,” Dr. Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said.
It’s the sort of accomplishment that never would have been possible without a commitment to innovation.
The same principle applies when it comes to your finances. You can’t reach new heights if you don’t reach for them. And that means abandoning business as usual.
Time to Try Defying Gravity
When we look at Artemis II, the first challenge it had to overcome on its historic journey was Earth’s gravity. It was no small task. It took 8.8 million pounds of thrust to help it break free.
You want your cash flow to go up, but traditional finance processes like manual data entry, manual invoice processing, and manual collections management are like gravity. They hold you down.
Consider these numbers:
- Manual processes cause an average of 3.2 days of delay in financial reporting.
- Manual data entry has an average error rate of 4.8%.
- Inefficient tasks can cost organizations up to $1.3M annually.
To get the most out of your finance team, they should be working strategically. Prioritizing collections activities based on risk and invoice size, and scheduling payments to help you capture early payment discounts while getting the most out of your cash. But when your team is busy manually entering data, chasing down approvals, or manually sending out payment reminders, there’s not a lot of time left over for that strategic work.
Automating your financial processes helps you break free, eliminating tedious busy work, such as manual data entry, while streamlining tasks like cash application and invoice approvals.
On the accounts payable (AP) side of things, automation:
- Eliminates 83% of manual data entry.
- 9x faster invoice processing.
- 99% accurate AI-assisted data capture.
Want to take a deeper dive? See how Mission Construction cut their invoice processing time by more than 80%.
The impact on accounts receivable (AR) is just as significant. AR automation gives you:
- An average 34% reduction in Days Sales Outstanding (DSO).
- 94% forecasting accuracy.
- 16 minutes saved per invoice.
You don’t have to take our word for it! Discover how OneSpan elevated their finances with automation and reduced DSO by 13 days.
Automation becomes like the thrusters on Artemis II. It helps you break free of the forces that hold your cash flow and efficiency down.
Going further with innovation
Sending humans further than they’ve ever traveled in space required a commitment to innovation. To help the crew succeed, they had to embrace technological innovations related to propulsion, advanced communications, safety simulation software, and more.
Taking your performance in finance to new heights also means embracing innovative technologies. Today, that largely means incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into your processes.
“Leaders should begin integrating AI agents and multiagent AI systems into their overall strategies and future road maps. This involves reimagining business processes, investing in AI capabilities, and fostering cultures of innovation.”
– Deloitte
In AR, AI is bringing value by enhancing:
- Collection management – Predictive analytics and machine learning are transforming the collections process by assessing at-risk payments and forecasting overdue account recovery.
- Cash application – By studying historical invoices and payments, as well as detecting patterns, the software can automatically apply incoming payments to open invoices.
- Dispute management – Incoming disputes and customer queries are scanned to assess their nature. It takes immediate action on requests that do not require human intervention, such as a request for an invoice copy. It then analyzes the remaining queries, assessing their priority level and flagging them for follow-up.
On the AP side of things, AI provides:
- Data capture and entry – Tools like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enhanced with machine learning extract data from invoices, purchase orders, and emails.
- Invoice matching – AI matches invoices with purchase orders and receipts, flagging discrepancies.
- Fraud detection and prevention – Invoices and expense receipts are scanned, and suspicious transactions, duplicates, or expenses that are out of policy are flagged for review.
- Payment optimization – Past payment history is studied so that the software can make recommendations on scheduling payments to maximize cash flow and capture early payment discounts.
With capabilities like this, AI turbo-charges your team, freeing them from routine, repetitive tasks.
“The most successful organizations reimagine jobs to seamlessly combine human strengths and AI capabilities, ensuring both aspects are used to their fullest potential…Advanced organizations streamline workflows that AI can execute end-to-end, while humans focus on judgment, exception handling, and strategic oversight.”
- Deloitte
Higher, Further, Faster
Though a few weeks have passed since Artemis II returned to Earth, people around the globe are still buzzing about their journey, celebrating humanity’s ability to reach further into the universe than ever before. An oft-repeated phrase in the mission’s aftermath was, “The Artemis II mission reminds us what's possible when courage meets innovation.”
That lesson applies to the world of business and finance as well. To achieve better cash flow, greater efficiency, and superior performance, you need dedication and innovation. The first and easiest step that teams can take is embracing automation and the capabilities of artificial intelligence.