The year is 2025, and any manual, labor-intensive processes that can be automated and aren’t yet are simply . . . so 2024. Likely even more out of date than that, but we’re willing to be lenient since it’s still January. But the point is: If you’re not automating as many of your business processes as you can—like, say, accounting automation—what are you even doing with your time except wasting it when it could be used so much better? 

That’s the crux of automation, too. Speeding up recurring processes while reducing the potential for error so the business can run on accurate information and employees can be freed up to do more strategic human work. Like taking information gleaned from reports run by accounting automation and using them to make the critical business decisions necessary for success. 

But just in case you’re still easing your way into 2025 or accounting automation (or both), let’s take a closer look at accounting automation and how it can help your team and your business in 2025 and beyond. 

What Is Accounting Automation?

Accounting automation is the use of technology and software to automate the traditionally manual and repetitive tasks and processes in accounting. It basically means that tasks can be completed much more efficiently and accurately. (And who doesn’t want that?)

With these rapid results available at the click of a button, accounting automation can help your business:

• Avoid cash flow crises. Accounting automation gives an instantaneous full picture of the cash flow so owners always know their financial status. Owners also get insight into how much they’re generating, where they spend most, and when to expect money to come in.
• Save time. Accounting automation can automate most transactions to eliminate manual data entry entirely. With faster accounting processes come reduced operating costs and improved scalability as well. Win / win.
• Access comprehensive analytics. Not only does accounting automation give businesses better organization and security over their data, it also fosters faster presentation and distribution of financial data to the right individuals across the company. Not to mention that accounting automation lends a more accurate way to analyze trends, variances, and predictability. 
• Provide more professional development. Any repetitive tasks that can be automated with the right tools will be the right change to help accountants be more productive and efficient, freeing them from the tedious tasks and opening up their schedules for professional development. Maybe even an actual coffee break. 

Automating Your Accounting with NetSuite

If you’re using a system like NetSuite, there are already multiple built-in accounting automations that you can leverage.

General Ledger

• Depreciation, amortization, and allocation. Ensure expenses are consistently recorded and applied to the appropriate cost centers.
• Revenue recognition. Apply standard or custom revenue rules for each deliverable. Automatically recognize revenue per the schedule of each contract commitment. 
• Journal entries. Leverage rules-based transaction matching and auto-posting of journal entries.

Accounts Payable

• Purchase controls. Automate three-way matching and approval workflows to simplify the process of confirming deliveries prior to issuing payment.
• Bill creation. Automatically create vendor bills from existing purchase orders.
• Recurring charges. Automatically schedule utilities and subscription fees for payment, or approve individually. 

Accounts Receivable 

• Invoice creation. Convert sales orders into customer invoices and avoid duplicate data entry.
• Subscription billing. Run multiple pricing scenarios, including tiered, volume, and customer-specific pricing; variable or consumption-based charges; promotion pricing and fixed fees.
• Billing schedules. Create and deliver invoices automatically with rules-based schedules that can be modified or paused at any time. 
• Collections. Send out automatic payment reminders and dunning letters. 
• Payment processing. Process customer payments automatically without integrating multiple payment networks.
• Invoice consolidation. Combine multiple invoices for a single account into one consolidated invoice. 

Close Management

• Bank reconciliation. Automatically create missing entries based on noted discrepancies from nightly bank downloads and automatic journal entry matching.
• Transaction matching. Automatically match customer payments to open invoices and confirm whether payment is full or partial, then update remaining balance or flag payment errors as needed. 
• Intercompany transactions. Link sales orders to purchase orders automatically as soon as they’re created for easy processing of intercompany transactions. Automated netting also simplifies intercompany account reconciliation.
• Financial consolidation. Automate the consolidation of subsidiary-level transactions and ensure compliance with accounting standards, tax codes, and reporting requirements for an accelerated close process. 

Add On To Your Automation

All these automations through NetSuite truly help streamline the accounting process. And when it comes to taking these automations to the next step with reporting, there’s still opportunity for automation. While some organizations are pulling saved searches and using their freed-up time to now work through manipulating saved search data in Excel for broader reporting needs, others are relying on integration such as ExtendInsights by CloudExtend to further their automation and improve efficiency and accuracy. 

ExtendInsight’s deep integration between Excel and NetSuite lets users pull not one, not two, but multiple saved searches into a workbook automatically. Once added to Excel, the saved search data can then be used to populate report templates and give you the exact view you’re looking for. And working with saved search data in Excel means you can leverage all of Excel’s most powerful features—including pivot tables, macros, and charts—to get exactly what you need from your date. 

The best part? With an ExtendInsights integration, data can be automatically refreshed on a scheduled basis so your reports are always up to date. Need a more recent look at your data? You can also refresh on-demand with a single click. You can’t get much more automated than that. 

Boost your accounting automation with a little help from ExtendInsights. Try it FREE for two weeks.