Digitalisation within financial controlling in times of crisis: what waste disposal companies have to do to secure their liquidity

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit SMEs hard and many companies are still a long way off from being able to breathe a sigh of relief. The headache for companies – not just in the waste management industry – has been securing liquidity.

Digital transformation before and during the crisis

It’s a fact that the crisis has forced us to increasingly switch to digital alternatives and has consequently shown us that benefiting from modern technologies and tools is not only wise, but also a necessity. Digital transformation was already a thing before COVID-19, but it has now been accelerated by it. Many companies are switching to more digital tools in order to keep their businesses running. In some cases, these have been stopgap measures more than methods with a long-term aim. But ‘long term’ is the buzzword here, because the trend in the direction of digitalisation continues and is now happening at a faster pace than ever.

Automation within financial controlling as a driver – an efficient advantage or a barely perceptible investment?

Digital transformation makes sense in all business areas, but especially so in the area of financial controlling. Investing in digitalising business processes offers long-term benefits. Financial analyses, data acquisition, processing and comparison, predictive recommendations and the visualisation of facts have an important role to play, not only now, but also further down the line to assist with decision making. It therefore makes sense for these to be automated using digital processes. Artificial intelligence can collect data, look for trends and patterns, and present data clearly in such a way that content which is specifically requested can be called up at the press of a button.

Financial controlling 2.0: how are the financial controller’s responsibilities changing?

If digital financial processes are updated automatically, this relieves the financial controlling staff of a lot of pressure and work. This enables them to provide the management with real-time information and forecasts regarding the company’s liquidity at any time, rather than first having to arduously and time-consumingly compile the data. Simulations of alternatives, budget revisions, ongoing forecast generation – this is all performed with a single mouse click. This also fundamentally changes and expands the requirements made of financial controlling. The new work responsibilities are no longer repetitive data compilation tasks, but instead focus on interpreting and communicating the results.

Digital transformation is affording financial controlling greater efficiency and also transparency. Transparent data is the key to more. Process acceleration, complexity reduction and higher data quality result in greater opportunities and improved data analysis. This highlights savings potential and allows risks to be identified early on. So as we can see, the benefits more than offset the expense.

Lasting impacts on cash management within controlling

All of the benefits mentioned above seem to speak clearly in favour of digital financial controlling. But are the benefits really so pronounced that they can safeguard liquidity in times of crisis?

The answer is ‘yes’. The future is made for digital processes. And it goes without saying that the finance and accounting departments will no longer want to work with weighty files and paper chaos. In times of crisis, you don’t want to be tackling fundamental obstacles within the system that ought to be replaced in order to be able to act flexibly and respond to events – you want to be able to act in line with the latest developments without worrying about anything. Not only would this save CFOs and CEOs developing quite a few worry lines, it would also make the day-to-day work of all the company employees more agreeable and more straightforward.

You can come through any crisis stronger than before and learn from your losses. This lies within digitalisation.

More about financial controlling: tegos Finance Dashboard as a digitalisation solution