If you work in Finance or RevOps, there’s probably at least one process that makes you think surely we don’t still have to do this manually.
Maybe it’s copying information from one system into another. Maybe it’s chasing approvals, checking contracts, reconciling records or making sure a change in one system is reflected everywhere else.
So, we’re curious:
What Finance process would you automate if you had a free afternoon?
Peter Coleman (Director of Finance at Tines) recently put together a Tines 3B example that tackles a particularly familiar one: Revenue recognition from Salesforce into NetSuite, with a human review step in the middle.
In a nutshell, this workflow automates the pipeline from Salesforce to NetSuite, applying revenue rules, billing schedules and partner margin calculations through a human-review interface.
When a deal is marked closed-won in Salesforce, what happens next in your organisation?
Does someone manually update NetSuite? Check the contract? Work out the right revenue treatment? Find or create the right customer? Send an approval request? Build the sales order and billing schedule?
Individually, none of these steps necessarily sounds particularly complicated. However, put them together and repeat them for every new deal, renewal, expansion or partner transaction. Now you have a process that can and has become surprisingly time-consuming.
Peter’s Tines 3B example takes that post-sale handoff and turns it into a guided workflow.
A closed-won opportunity is pulled from Salesforce and staged for review. Finance can then review, edit, consolidate and approve the deal before anything is written to the ERP. Once approved, the workflow handles the downstream processing in NetSuite, while keeping an audit trail along the way.
The interesting part for us is that the human hasn’t been removed from the process. Instead, the repetitive work is automated and the person is brought in at the point where their judgement is most useful.
For me, this flow is a great example of a daily finance process worth automating precisely because there can be so many rules and edge cases to consider. What I particularly like about this approach is that it doesn’t try to automate the judgement out of the process.
You don’t necessarily want an automation blindly pushing every deal straight through. You want the system to do the legwork by pulling the correct information together, applying the relevant rules and flagging anything that needs attention. This then gives the finance team a clear point to review, edit and approve before anything moves onto the next stage into NetSuite.
That balance is what makes this interesting to me. The automation takes care of the repetitive work but the finance team stays in complete control of the decisions that actually require context and judgement. For processes with lots of rules and exceptions, I think that’s often a much more useful way to approach automation rather than trying to make everything hands off.
You can read more in depth about why Peter built this and his thoughts around it here but one of the things that jumped out to us was that when Peter said “I built the app to meet our exact requirements, something third-party solutions couldn’t do. And when I need to make changes, I just push them live — no waiting on a vendor.” and to top it all off this application costs less than $1k to build but is saving the finance team over $60k a year.
So, what would you automate?
A few ideas:
- Expense approvals
- Month-end reconciliation
- Accounts receivable management
- New vendor verification and creation
What process would you automate if you had a free afternoon? Tell us about it below.