-
Investing Tech Budget in Business Process Automation
Did your company increase its technology spending for this year? If so, you’re in good company. Last fall, a Gartner survey of 301 senior finance leaders found that 77% of the respondents planned to increase their tech budgets in 2025. Of those CFOs and other leaders, 47% of them said they planned to increase the technology budget by 10% or more. That’s a far larger percentage investing in technology than in any other category, including staffing expenses and cost of goods sold.
This is part of a trend in recent years: 50% of surveyed CFOs planned to increase tech spending by at least 10% in 2024 as well, and 43% in 2023. According to Randeep Rathindran, Gartner’s distinguished vice president of research, “Investing in technology is no longer a choice but a necessity for companies aiming to maintain a competitive edge.” The truth of that statement is reflected in the budgeting priorities of modern CFOs.
Rathindran also highlights the importance of “digital transformation” to drive “innovation and efficiency.” This is an area where business process automation (BPA) software excels. Financial process automation can power and simplify processes including accounts payable, purchasing, expense reimbursement, budgeting, and capital project management.
What Is BPA Software?
As the name suggests, BPA software automates key business processes. It doesn’t replace human employees, but it makes their jobs much easier. In the accounts payable department, for example, AP automation software can take over repetitive and routine tasks like data entry, matching invoices with POs, and tracking payment deadlines. The software speeds up and streamlines the accounts payable process, providing employees with the tools to do their jobs quickly and effectively. It also frees up some of their time so they can focus on tasks they might not have had time for before (e.g. data analysis instead of manual data entry).
A BPA software program is typically designed to automate one department. Here at NextProcess, we offer modules for Accounts Payable, Capital Project Management, Document Management, Expense Reports, and Procurement and Purchase Orders. You could automate just one or two departments, but taken together these modules provide an end-to-end solution for financial processing that combines seamlessly with existing ERPs.
What Type of Technology Does BPA Use?
If you’re pitching technology advancement to your company or you’re a CFO collaborating with the rest of the C-Suite, it helps to know what types of technology you’re talking about. If you bring up automation software, for example, and someone asks if it’s a type of AI, what are you going to say?
Modern business process automation can incorporate a type of AI called machine learning (we’re doing that here at NextProcess). This technology enables BPA software to “learn” your company’s way of managing finances. It becomes more efficient and customized to your company’s way of doing things the longer you use the software.
BPA software also incorporates other technologies, like optical character recognition (OCR). OCR turns printed text into digital text files that are editable and searchable (rather than just scanning a printed file, like an invoice or contract, as an image). In addition, NextProcess also incorporates document indexing technology that creates a searchable index for virtually every aspect of the document. That includes all the information in the document (text, barcodes, etc.) and metadata (date received, user who submitted, etc.).
What is the ROI on BPA Software?
When you’re trying to decide where to spend your company’s technology budget, you want to know that you’ll get a good return on your investment. Implementing BPA software can result in significant cost savings for your company, along with a variety of other benefits.
Exactly how much money you’ll save with BPA software varies. It depends on what type of system you had before, how much you automate, and other individual factors. Looking at accounts payable automation as an example, studies show dramatic savings for automated AP departments vs. manual, paper-based departments. We find that organizations with fully automated AP departments save an average of $14.93 per invoice. Our clients typically break even in 9 to 12 months and then see additional reductions in processing costs as they continue to use the software.
Automation provides greater cash flow insight and control. With purchasing automation, you’ll have the tools needed to reduce or eliminate maverick spending and enforce purchasing controls. With expense report automation, you can speed up and streamline reimbursement while reducing fraudulent charges. With capital project management, you’ll have more robust budgeting tools and real-time insight into where the money is going. Across the board, BPA software saves money and makes processes more efficient.
What Are Your Options for Automating?
When you research technology options for automating financial functions, you’ll see terms like Business Process Automation (BPA), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS). We have a whole article on the differences between them (click to read), but let’s summarize your BPA options here.
Assuming you want to automate and keep processes in-house rather than outsource them entirely, you can choose between BPA software that you purchase once and install on your company’s computers (in-house or on-premises software) or a software subscription program. Subscription-based BPA might be something you can download for offline use, or it could be cloud-based with the software hosted by a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) supplier.
NextProcess is an example of cloud-based BPA. Your company pays to use the software, and our company handles the technical side of things like software updates, integrations with your ERP program, and data security. You can customize the software extensively to match your company’s needs and automatically enforce policies. The transaction-based pricing model is affordable and makes it easy to scale your processes as needed.
BPA software delivers an excellent return on your investment in technology for your company. If you’d like to see for yourself how the software works, contact us today. We’ll set up a free demo and answer your questions about how investing in BPA software can help your company.
