Reader’s question:
“I want to automate more of our month-end process but I don’t know where to start. We have a small team and no dedicated resource for implementation. What would you prioritise first?”
Harriet’s answer:
Start with the map, not the tools
Before you look at anything new, spend an hour mapping what your month-end actually involves. Not the clean version you’d describe in a meeting. The real one. Every step, who owns it, how long it takes, and where things reliably go wrong. You’ll almost certainly find the same thing most teams find: a handful of tasks eating up a disproportionate amount of time, and most of that time spent on work that doesn’t actually need a human to do it.
Where to focus first
When I joined Arbolus, AP was entirely manual. No expense system, no employee cards, invoices keyed in by hand. It was messy, error-prone, and nobody really trusted the numbers coming out of it. That was the first thing we fixed. Consolidation came next: we weren’t producing proper consolidated financials at all, just a rough P&L that had been stitched together manually. Both got sorted relatively quickly, and the difference was felt immediately.
The one that delivered fastest
Intercompany was where we got the biggest return. We had four entities across the UK, Spain, India and the US, and my finance manager was spending a full day preparing invoices manually, sometimes longer, with intercompany accounts that were never properly reconciled. It was one of those processes that just quietly absorbed time every single month.
When we brought in Mayday, it went from a day or more to a matter of clicks. The implementation was quick, the team picked it up without much friction, and it solved a real problem cleanly. That’s what you’re looking for: something that fixes a specific pain point, integrates with what you’ve already got, and doesn’t require a three-month rollout to see the benefit.
The mistake worth avoiding
In the year before I left we implemented an FP&A tool. Genuinely powerful, lots of potential – and we never got there. It was complex, the implementation dragged, and when we lost a key team member mid-project we didn’t have the capacity to keep it moving. The tool wasn’t the problem. We just didn’t have the bandwidth to do it justice.
On dedicated resource
You probably don’t need one. The people doing the work are best placed to improve it. What you might need is capacity. If everyone’s already stretched, asking them to run improvement projects alongside the day job usually doesn’t work. Sometimes the right move is bringing in an extra pair of hands short-term, just to create the breathing room to actually get things done.
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