The productivity leap in finance – are you ready to jump?
The financial statements season is at its busiest as I write this blog. My first thought as I put my fingers on the keyboard is: should I use AI? I would like to optimise my time, but the text needs to sound like me. ChatGPT, Deepseek and Copilot will sit this one out.
Instead, I will give ChatGPT the task of creating an English summary of the financial statements. Thanks to Sofigates Business Licenses, the work is easier and safer than ever before. Same time I wonder how much our accountants and team will be able to utilise new automation and artificial intelligence when preparing the next financial statements.
At Sofigate, we have not only excellent financial management systems and reporting tools but also AI available to every employee to assist in daily work. For our finance team, the personal goal is to use AI and automation even more effectively.
Finance as a pioneer in AI
I believe – and this comment is mainly for my dear CFO colleagues – that we in financial management have been pioneers in adopting new technologies. During the Covid era, every last paper-based exception in financial processes had to be eliminated. In Sweden, companies could not yet reach full paperlessness in travel expense circulation due to legislation – thankfully, that obstacle is now history.
Automation in administrative work is becoming a given. Purchase invoices are approved automatically when they are based on stored contracts and stay within defined euro limits. Robots go through billing comparison lists and neatly present exceptions that require attention in Excel for the controller.
AI summarises cost-saving opportunities and investment grounds faster than the human eye can comprehend. Cybersecurity systems scan internal network data 24/7 and alert responsible persons immediately when something unusual occurs. Customer service bots are already part of everyday life, but fortunately, they keep getting smarter every day.
A controller’s dream day
A few years ago, we significantly improved our team’s productivity when we renewed Sofigate’s own administrative processes and ERP along the way. At that time, together with my finance team, we envisioned an ideal situation: what would a controller’s dream workday look like?
Here are the ingredients of that dream day:
- systems produce reliable data quickly and automatically
- all authorised parties can easily access the data
- the data is easy to read, different reports and analyses run smoothly, and they are up to date and clear
- the data producer (person or system) is the original source, and information flows seamlessly across different interfaces
We are now surprisingly close to this dream vision, but AI makes us dream even further. Are we ready for the next step? How could we take the next leap?
A vision for the future – AI and finance hand in hand
How would it feel if a controller could, over their morning coffee, go through the insights AI has brought overnight from the data it has analysed? It could show the bottlenecks of ongoing projects. It could suggest how to optimise the use of internal and external expert resources based on skills, availability and cost. It could provide weekly tips on how users have used their software licences: are we paying for overlapping or unnecessary licences, and how could we optimise that?
In fact, what is described above is no longer utopia – it is already happening with today’s tools.
The dream is already becoming reality
Let’s take the controller’s dream one step further. What if new desired features could be implemented in the system at the touch of a button, without weeks of configuration work? Every CFO is in one way or another dependent on the technology used to perform processes, and equally on the experts who can make that technology work in the right way.
It may sound surprising, but the automation of configurations is also becoming part of everyday life. AI agents are being built into technology platforms. They understand the technology deeply and can suggest how a solution model should be constructed in practice. They can even begin to implement that solution.
Whenever a technology or IT project comes up, the CFO naturally thinks: what concrete benefit will this bring? Will productivity improve? Will manual work and errors decrease? Will the project meet the expectations of the business and users? How will the investment be financed?
In my experience, resources can always be found for value-adding investments, but the CFO must have up-to-date visibility into both operating costs and the value generated by technology.
For the coming year, I have set myself a challenge: a productivity leap driven by AI. To achieve it, I need information and partners who carry AI under their arm. In my CFO role, I am in a fortunate position – I do not need to look far to find them. AI Agent factory is already up and running here at Sofigate.
Dear CFO colleague, will you join the challenge?
About the author
Virpi Hentunen is the Chief Financial Officer of Sofigate and a member of Sofigate’s executive team.
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