Where are Accounting and Finance teams struggling today? How is automation helping? Who is leading the charge in adoption? And what do leaders and operators think about AI?
Last month, October 2024, we collected our final response for a brand new industry survey to answer these questions and many more.
The State of Automation for Revenue Accounting is now available – get the full results here.
Below are just a handful of highlights from the data, including a mix of confirmed truths and surprising revelations. We’re sharing where the data came from, examples of the questions we asked, and six key takeaways. There’s a lot more data to see, so be sure to check out the full report.
Current data from your peers (and probably your competitors too)
- 288 accounting and finance professionals from North America
- Representing points of view from all team roles, from CFO to Analyst and everyone in between
- Focusing on high-growth business types and revenue models, including subscription and SaaS, retail and e-commerce, marketplace, and more.
Company Size by Annual Revenue
Necessary questions to uncover the truth
Respondents weighed in on over 30 questions spanning a number of topics, including overall business challenges, specific processes like month-end close and revenue recognition, team goals and deliverables, and adoption and perception of automation and AI.
Here’s a sampling of 10 of the questions:
- Are the demands of your business growing faster than your team can keep up with?
- What are your overall top challenges as an accounting and finance professional?
- What are your most challenging tasks or aspects of revenue recognition?
- How happy are you with the level of errors or gaps that exist in your revenue data?
- Is your team delivering on expectations around executive and cross-functional business insights?
- Do you think your team is leading, trailing, or keeping pace with other departments and industry peers in adoption of automation?
- What task or process needs to be automated next?
- Do you trust automation to perform accounting tasks and processes? What about AI?
- How important are automation skills and experience for career advancement?
- What’s your biggest barrier to adopting more automation?
Results snapshot: 6 key takeaways (many more in the full report)
1. Business demands are outpacing Accounting and Finance resources
- Overall, 48% say this is true. It’s felt more acutely among growing businesses starting in the $50-$200M annual revenue range and peaking with enterprises with more than $500M in annual revenue.
- Most respondents also cited time to complete work and hiring / staff / training among their top 3 challenges as an accounting professional today.
- At its core, automation solutions are designed to help improve efficiency, essentially do more with less. And yet, an overwhelming majority (over 75%) say they are automating little to none of their most time-intensive processes: monthly close and rev rec. It’s reasonable to say that by adopting more automation solutions, Accounting and Finance teams would directly address this key concern.
2. Two key roles are unhappy (even very unhappy) with monthly close and revenue recognition processes
- Overall, accounting and finance pros say that their processes for closing the books and performing revenue recognition are manageable. Most are closing the books in five days or less.
- However, 50% of Controllers & 69% of Systems pros report monthly close pain, with 8% & 19%, respectively, saying it's "Very painful."
- And 54% of Controllers and 69% of Systems professionals say rev rec is painful (42% of managers agree).
- Lastly, despite the manageable label, over 33% of respondents across all company sizes require more than six days to close, and 10% of companies in the $200-500M range require more than two weeks to close the books. One reasonable conclusion is that these teams suffer from process inefficiencies. Automation represents a substantial opportunity to improve this and help these organizations get to the valuable revenue facts and insights that can help inform better decisions.
3. Systems leaders are the most unhappy with their data and processes
- 50% of Systems pros and 29% of Controllers are unhappy with the level of errors and/or gaps in their revenue data.
- 27% of Controllers and 44% of systems professionals are unhappy with the time it takes to perform rev rec. The majority of Controllers are neutral on this, and while that’s not “unhappy,” it’s also not positive.
- 40% of Controllers and 44% of Systems pros are unhappy with the manual effort required to perform rev rec. Notably, 25% of accounting and finance managers are also unhappy here.
- Overall respondents also included both accuracy and compliance in the top five list of challenges they are facing as an accounting professional.
- One more here: 38% of Systems pros are unhappy or very unhappy with the audit-readiness of their revenue data, where the average unhappy result across all other roles was 15%. It begs the question, what do Systems pros know that others don’t? Accounting and Finance leaders should be taking a hard look at their technology stack and processes in 2025 – and budgeting for change now – to ensure that what's in place will move the business forward, not hold it back.
One additional takeaway here. When asked to name the biggest challenge around revenue recognition, 45% of respondents said finding and fixing errors is #1. Too many manual processes and keeping up with the changes in the business took the second and third spots.
"Data is foundational to every decision a finance team makes. It’s troubling to see how many Controllers and Systems professionals are acknowledging the reality of these inefficiencies. These are the people closest to the operational heartbeat of the business and reliant on high quality data. Their frustration is a clear signal that investment is needed in solutions that replace manual tasks, improve accuracy, and reduce gaps in critical revenue data – something automation excels at." -Ray Lau, Leapfin CEO
4. Technology and data are the biggest overall challenge
- When asked to share their biggest overall challenges as an accounting professional, 33% of respondents said technology and data was #1.
- Up next: keeping up with demands, including not having enough time to get everything done (26%), staffing and training (20%), accuracy of the numbers (18%), and compliance (17%).
“This reaffirms what we’ve long understood: finance teams are often constrained by legacy tools and fragmented data systems. The question isn’t whether teams want to improve – it’s how quickly can they get the resources and support they need to modernize? Bridging this gap should be a priority for any organization looking to stay competitive.” -Ray Lau
5. Accounting Automation is trusted, AI to a lesser degree
- Overall, 83% say they trust accounting automation to perform accounting and finance tasks or processes.
- And 56% say they would trust AI to perform these tasks and processes, however only 23% say they currently use it.
"I didn’t need a survey to tell me this! Automation is trusted because it’s reliably solving known problems. The opportunity for AI is to anticipate unknown problems and optimize processes in ways we haven’t imagined yet. We’re charting a very exciting course for AI innovation within Leapfin starting with the release of Luca, and I can’t wait for our customers to get their hands on it.” -Ray Lau
6. Cost is the biggest barrier to adopting more automation
- So said 32% of the respondents.
- And the second biggest barrier? Lack of internal resources. Which could easily be argued is also a cost limitation.
"It’s important to frame automation as an investment, not an expense. The inefficiencies caused by manual processes – errors, time-to-value at month-end close, and high staff burnout – are far more costly in the long term. Solving the hardest data challenges and showing tangible ROI, as we’ve done with our clients, is how we help teams move past this hurdle." -Ray Lau
Big finish
Let’s look at the story these results are telling us:
- Business demands are exceeding capabilities and pushing support structures past the breaking point
- Manual processes can’t keep up, and they increase risk of errors
- Data and technology is the overall #1 challenge for accounting and finance pros
- Controllers and Systems pros are most unhappy about the quality of their revenue data and the speed of their revenue processes
- 92% agree automation makes them more efficient - 53% say a lot more efficient
- Over 75% of teams are automating little to none of their primary monthly revenue accounting processes
- Cost – or rather lack of investment – is the primary blocker of adopting more automation solutions
- And 55% of teams say executives (CFOs) and Controllers lead the charge in championing adoption of tech like automation. We didn’t talk about this result earlier in the post but it is captured in the full report.
- One more: 66% of executives, 50% of Controllers, and 57% of Systems pros say automation skills and experience are very important and even required for career advancement.
"I love this last one. Accounting and finance isn’t just about numbers anymore – it’s highly interconnected with technology. Using technology and data to own the revenue story (shoutout to our recent episode of Undisclosed for this one). Professionals who invest in upgrading their tech stack and embracing these different skills will be the ones leading the way. As demands continue to increase and resources become more scarce, Leapfin’s mission is to empower Accounting and Finance teams with a reliable solution to some of the hardest problems they’re facing.." -Ray Lau
Summary
Not all Accounting and Finance teams or roles feel the same pain, but the data shows that pain is present for most. The most common pains stem from challenges around process inefficiency, manual effort, slow or stagnant growth, incomplete and inaccurate reporting, errors and audit risk, and missed opportunities. All of these challenges share a common denominator: data.
Sometimes in life, the answer to a problem is to do nothing. Some problems can go away on their own. But in business, solving problems requires action. Accounting and finance professionals have all the information needed to act. You know your people, systems, and processes. You know the milestones and deliverables to expect every month, quarter, and year. You know the expectations on you and your team, and the risks and consequences of not delivering – or worse, getting it wrong. And lastly, you know your 2025 outcomes if you choose to do nothing.
Don’t do nothing. Consider where you want to be at this time next year, and talk with your team about how different things could look with revenue data that’s always accounting-ready and doesn’t require grinding busy work to get there.
Helpful resources
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