For organizations intending to grow, scalability is key. When a company has momentum, having to stop to hire proportional headcount to your growth is frustrating and time-consuming. Scalability the difference between smooth, continuous growth and fractured growth in between hiring stints.
What Makes a Back Office Scalable?
Back office scalability is the capacity of your operations to grow and expand output without needing a significant increase in headcount. The main goal is to not have to add proportional headcount when operations increase. Oftentimes this is achieved through technology and business process improvements.
How to Increase Back Office Scalability
The easiest way to increase your organization’s back office scalability is to have technology that allows for growth without increases to headcount. Some examples of technology that can help are:
Vendor Portals
Vendor portals can significantly reduce labor for accounts payable, therefore reducing the amount of labor added to AP’s plate when new suppliers are onboarded.
Self-service is one of the biggest benefits of vendor portals. When vendors can submit an invoice and see its status in real time, this directly reduces the number of calls and emails your AP department receives.
Vendor Onboarding
Vendor onboarding workflows within a vendor portal also promote vendor self-service. Instead of the manual back-and-forth, new suppliers can enter their own information via the vendor packet. With automatic validations in place, your organization saves significant amounts of time entering information as well as verifying vendor details.
Intelligent Document Processing
Intelligent document processing makes document capture significantly simpler. Instead of having to manually key invoices, IDP allows for almost instantaneous data capture. A combination of OCR, AI, and ML, IDP has a very high extraction rate, as well as a significant rate of straight-through processing.
Workflows and Improving Business Processes
Creating intuitive workflows, eliminating manual tasks, and improving your overall business processes play a huge role in how smoothly the financial back office runs. Ensuring that the basis of your financial back office is in order is key to ensuring that any technology added to your stack is effective.
Get Started
With ICG’s solutions, businesses find it easy to scale operations. Not only do they help organizations scale their operations, but the solutions themselves are scalable and modular. This means that you can build on your solutions as you go instead of having to implement everything all at once. To learn more about ICG’s options to increase scalability, request a demo.