For centuries, financial documents were prepared manually — a resource-intensive, time-consuming, and tedious process prone to errors. It can lead to a host of challenges, including poor decision-making, compliance issues, tax implications, audit difficulties, lost opportunities, and reputation damage.

Cutting-edge platforms like Docupilot provide a superior alternative - financial document automation - to manual processes. This approach streamlines document handling and addresses the challenges associated with manual processing.

This article covers the benefits of financial document automation, associated challenges, use cases, best practices, and features to look for when selecting a solution for your business.

What is financial document automation?

Financial document automation uses advanced software to automate and streamline document creation, management, and processing.

For example, consider a bank that needs to inform thousands of customers about an address change. All customer data, including postal addresses, is stored in an Excel spreadsheet or a database. Generating these letters would require multiple resources and would take days if not weeks. 

With Docupilot’s Excel-to-Word document automation, however, the entire process can be completed in minutes. Here’s how:

1. An employee creates a template for the letter the bank wants to send
2. They connect the data source, linking it to the Excel file with customer data
3. They set up output options, including file format and location
4. Docupilot creates consistent and accurate documents - in bulk, in minutes, at scale

Now that we understand financial document automation, let's learn about its benefits for businesses. 

Benefits of financial document automation

Automation of financial documents frees up valuable time and resources for your business. It can transform financial operations, drive significant organizational improvements, and help you focus on strategic decision-making and growth.

Lower costs, higher profits

Documentation tasks are often repetitive and resource-intensive. As the volume of documents grows, businesses must allocate more resources, which increases costs, or extends the time required to create the documents, making the process inefficient. 

Automation solves both problems: you need a small group of trained resources to manage documentation tasks, and features such as Docupilot’s bulk generation can generate a large number of documents in minutes. 

With automation, you can reduce costs and improve profitability, without sacrificing documentation quality. 

Create more documents with minimal to no errors 

The repetitive nature of documentation leads to mental fatigue and boredom, causing individuals to lose focus and overlook important details. Monotonous tasks lead to disengagement, resulting in careless mistakes or omissions.

Time and client pressures can compound these problems, increasing the probability of human mistakes and errors.

By automating repetitive tasks, it minimizes the chances of oversight or mistakes, ensuring a more reliable and precise outcome. This enhances accuracy and also frees individuals to focus on higher-value tasks, boosting engagement and quality.

Streamline workflows for enhanced productivity

A critical step in document creation is the review and approval process. With multiple stakeholders involved, clarifications and revisions lead to extended back-and-forth exchanges. Scheduling conflicts make alignment on review sessions or approval meetings challenging.

With document automation, you can streamline and automate the review and approval process, minimize delays, and enhance the productivity of document handling processes. 

Docupilot, for example, integrates with 70+ third-party apps, including  Zapier, Make, and Airtable, letting you easily set up workflows for document generation, signing, storage, and delivery. You can also 

Scale cost-effectively 

Automating repetitive tasks significantly reduces the need for manual labor and operational costs, and enables businesses to focus on tasks with higher strategic value. 

Automation also speeds up documentation processes. Your business can handle higher work volumes without a corresponding increase in staffing or resources. You can even scale as required without incurring additional costs.

Meet regulatory and compliance requirements

Compliance is critical for the financial sector. It maintains transparency, protects investors, prevents illegal activities like fraud, market manipulation, and money laundering, and protects financial institutions and their clients. 

Document automation platforms offer several features that help financial institutions stay compliant.

Standardized templates minimize errors and inconsistencies, while version control prevents the use of outdated documents. Audit trails track changes and approvals, and compliance checks within automated workflows reduce the risk of non-compliance. Automation also reduces costly human errors that can lead to compliance failures.

The lower margin for error improves good will, trust and customer experience 

Customers must be able to trust financial institutions to keep their money and investments safe, protect data, and provide reliable services. Customer trust and goodwill build loyalty, aid customer acquisition, drive growth, and are the basis for sustainability. Financial document automation enhances customer trust and loyalty.

Document automation reduces wait times and improves overall service efficiency. Customers receive consistent messaging and information, which reduces confusion and builds trust. Automation simplifies complex processes, such as onboarding and transaction approvals, making it easier for customers to interact with your organization. 

Challenges of financial document automation and how to overcome them

While automation is a powerful solution, you must overcome a few challenges to derive maximum benefit from this amazing technology.

High initial costs

Upfront costs for software, hardware, and infrastructure, regular maintenance, and ongoing technical support can strain budgets, especially for smaller organizations.

SaaS solutions like Docupilot offer a practical solution: no upfront costs or fees for maintenance and technical support. Simple credit-based pricing provides access to all features, enabling businesses of all sizes to reap the benefits of automated financial documents.  

Some solutions may offer little room for customization

Many document automation solutions cater to specific financial niches, like banking or insurance. They offer standardized templates and workflows that may not align with your organization’s unique processes. Limited customization restricts the usability and efficacy of such solutions.

Doupilot provides an easy solution to this challenge: it supports multiple file formats with a fully-customizable template builder for any financial document. You can add text, images, tables, branding elements, and apply custom formatting. Compatibility with multiple third-party tools lets you populate documents from a wide range of data sources. 

Protecting sensitive financial data

Data breaches, unauthorized access, and insider threats are significant risks to the sensitive personal and financial data in financial documents. Financial institutions must comply with strict regulations, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), to implement the highest level of security and privacy.

Choose solutions like Docupilot are committed to providing the highest level of data security:

• All data is encrypted in transit and at rest
• The Software Development Life Cycle incorporates rigorous code review standards, segregated environments, and automated testing
• Cloud services provide full redundancy with robust disaster recovery protocols. Docupilot employs strict firewall rules, continuous monitoring, and limited access controls.
• Docupilot is committed to GDPR and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance and is in the process of obtaining ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certification

Resistance to change

All change initiatives face resistance, and any change strategy can only be successful if the causes of resistance are understood.

A lack of knowledge regarding the benefits of document automation can lead to skepticism and resistance to adopting new tools and processes. Furthermore, employees accustomed to established workflows will resist changes, fearing that new systems will disrupt productivity.

Effective communication, clear demonstration of benefits, comprehensive training, and involving employees in the transition process are all key elements of a successful strategy. These elements ensure that your team can smoothly implement the technology and fully benefit from its capabilities. 

Use cases of financial document automation

There are numerous use cases of document automation for financial institutions. Here are some of them”

Financial reporting

Automation tools can gather data, perform calculations, generate reports, and distribute them to relevant stakeholders. 

Tax document processing

Software tools can automate the tax filing process, from data entry to calculations and tax document generation. 

Client onboarding

Document automation can speed up onboarding by creating personalized documents for customers. Automated notifications and reminders can keep clients informed about the onboarding status, provide transparency, and improve customer experience. 

Customer statements and communication

Automated, timely generation of customer statements, confirmations, and notifications keeps customers informed about the status of their investments, transactions, and changes in policies and procedures.

Best practices for financial document automation

Follow these best practices to streamline implementation at your business. 

Ensure data accuracy

Data inaccuracies can result in compliance issues, financial misstatements, operational inefficiencies, undermine customer trust, and damage relationships.

To ensure data accuracy,businesses must include data quality standards, automated data validation checks, regular data audits, and employee training on data best practices.

Implement standardized workflows

Standardized workflows help reduce variability and minimize the risk of errors. Furthermore, integrating essential checks into standard workflows facilitates regulatory compliance. For example, to ensure accuracy, you can use Docupilot’s Zapier integration to implement workflows for creation, review, and approval of document templates. 

Prioritize user training

Ongoing user training can accomplish multiple business objectives: it helps users gain familiarity with automation tools, demonstrates the benefits of automation and encourages adoption, and enables users to develop a sense of ownership by involving them in the implementation and change management process. 

Establish security protocols

Robust security measures are mandatory for protecting the high volume of confidential and sensitive data handled by financial institutions and for regulatory compliance. Establish security protocols, implement well-defined security practices, and provide ongoing user training to protect data from external and internal threats.

What to look for in financial document automation software

Using a solution with the right mix of features is pivotal to the success of document automation initiatives. Look for these seven essential features when evaluating your options.

Ease of use

A user-friendly design is necessary for encouraging user adoption. It also reduces the need for extensive training and support, which lowers costs associated with solution implementation.

Support for multiple document formats

A solution that supports multiple document formats will cater to varying user needs and preferences and provide compatibility for the import/export of data between systems.

Integration capabilities

Document automation solutions must integrate with third-party applications for sourcing data, e-signatures, secure storage, document delivery, and more. These integrations help minimize errors and delays associated with manual entry, allow the implementation of automated workflows, and enhance the efficiency of the automation process.

Ease of customization

The ability to tailor a solution to their needs allows financial institutions to utilize automation for documents with varying structures, formatting, and branding. 

Security 

In addition to being a key component of compliance requirements, data security is a requisite for gaining and retaining customer trust. The document automation solution you select must provide robust security and support your compliance efforts.

Scalability

Business requirements change due to evolving regulations, market dynamics, technological advances, and customer expectations. Therefore, it is imperative to select a solution that scales with your business requirements.

Audit trails

Audit trails, which are chronological records of document-related actions, such as creation, modification, or access, serve multiple purposes. They provide a record of actions taken on financial documents, which is required for compliance, help organizations identify and address discrepancies, deter fraudulent activities, and serve as a historical reference for internal audits and reviews.

Conclusion

Financial document automation is essential to the operations of businesses in the financial sector. 

Manual documentation processes are time-consuming and labor-intensive. They don’t scale economically and are prone to human errors.

Automated document processes improve efficiency and accuracy, and provide cost-effective scalability and robust security. 

Docupilot is a full-featured document automation solution for all financial documents. It offers unmatched customization, integrates with 70+ apps, and provides robust security. The affordable credit-based pricing makes it accessible for businesses of all sizes. Docupilot helps reduce costs and significantly improve the efficiency of your documentation processes.

Contact Docupilot today for a free trial, or book a demo.

FAQs

Which financial documents can be automated?

Financial document automation is applicable to a wide range of financial documents, including invoices, purchase orders, expense reports, loan applications, financial statements, tax filings, contracts, audit reports, client onboarding documents, and compliance reports.

What is financial statement automation?

Financial statement automation is the process of using technology and software tools to streamline the preparation, generation, and distribution of financial statements. It reduces manual effort and errors and improves efficiency, accuracy, and regulatory compliance.