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5 Best Practices for Automating Your Office Workflows

10/4/2021

 
The importance of workflow automation cannot be denied. These 5 best practices for automating your office workflows will guide you to the success you desire. First, it ensures specific tasks complete on time. Additionally, processes allow your employees to focus on more productive activities instead of wasting their time on mundane assignments.

However, even though you have automated specific processes, anticipate that they might be hampered by inadvertent delays, obstacles, and bottlenecks. Some difficulties that occur are almost always inevitable. Employees who need to review applications, for instance, become ill and miss work. Documents and files are misplaced. Machine failures occur in manufacturing operations.

Nevertheless, for everything that is avoidable, there is a lot you can do to maintain your automated workflows running well. After all, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “by neglecting to prepare, you are prepared to fail!”
In this article, we discuss five excellent practices to prevent needless bottlenecks in your workflows. However, before we delve into these practices, let’s first understand what workflow automation is.

What is Workflow Automation?

Workflow automation eliminates the issues created by manual processes by connecting systems with software. As a result, automating procedures in your organization may significantly decrease the money and time required to operate. In addition, automation allows workers to focus on mission-critical tasks while avoiding costly mistakes. For example, you can make the process more efficient and potentially save costs by automating your accounting activities.

Due to its efficiency, workflow automation has grown tremendously in the past few years. In fact, according to a global survey conducted by McKinsey & Co. in 2020, 66% of business leaders from a broad cross-selection industry were initiating solutions to automate at least one of their business processes. You can learn the fundamentals of workflow in our K2 course Workflow and Automation Essentials.

5 Best Practices for Workflow Automation

Workflow automation is becoming more sophisticated inside accounting products, document management products, and from the significant productivity suite providers such as Microsoft 365 with modules like Microsoft Power Automate or Zoho Flow. But we must get the workflows optimized first! Consider these 5 best practices for automating your office workflows.

1. Create An Office Workflow Plan

The most straightforward procedures are sometimes more complicated than you realize, specifically with numerous phases and approvals. That is why almost every workflow requires a map.

Workflow process mapping is a method of keeping track of your work steps so that you understand what each step does, why it is functioning, and what to do when something “breaks.”

Workflow maps don’t have to be complex or challenging to create and understand. They can be just a few post-it notes on a board or a doodle in a notebook. Remember, a post-it note turned 45 degrees makes a diamond shape. So, one pad of post-it notes gives you all the flow-charting shapes you need.

However, having a finished a written or sketched workflow map may keep you and your employees aware of every stage in the process, so they understand what to expect. In addition, process mapping your existing process (“as-is”) lets you transition the process to a new, hopefully, better, process (“to-be”).

Hence, before you do anything at all, begin with workflow mapping. Then, even if your workflow is already in place, map it out. Consider each process and step and reviewed it meticulously.

2. Apply Strategies to Your Workflow Automation

Workflow automation is more than just making a list of operations that need improvement and then crossing them off one by one.

Creating business automation and managing in this manner is akin to attempting to untangle tangled wires by grabbing one and pulling. Of course, you’ll make some headway. Those victories, though, will be few. However, you’ll soon find that you’ve made the knots much, much worse. And repairing it will require additional time and resources. The current term “hairball” describes what many have created with flawed workflow processes and best-of-breed SaaS solution selection.

Instead, it would be best to emphasize process automation by weighing efficiency, simplicity of use, ROI, and business effect. Then, if done correctly, you would be able to automate the right activities, which will allow you to reap the benefits of automation. Sometimes you need a separate workflow product like XCM, Doc.It, or with the workflow built into most accounting software products today.

3. Train and Equip All Stakeholders

When things are going wrong, it’s simple to point the finger at those allocated to certain workflow phases. If an approval step, for example, is delayed, the person in charge of authorizing it may get emails about this until the stage is approved. However, management or leadership should first ask questions before making assumptions about why a specific process phase hasn’t been performed.

Is the person in charge of this process step equipped with all they need to execute it? Do they even have access to the necessary tools? Further, are they receiving alerts? Above all, are they informed of the problem?

When you inquire about your process constraints, you are more likely to obtain a helpful response. However, when something goes wrong, consult with your staff before making the decision. We recommend a debriefing when there are process failures to get to the root cause.

Moreover, these issues can be avoided by ensuring that all the stakeholders are trained and given all the tools needed to carry out their part efficiently.

4. The Best Practice is to Select the Best Processes to Automate

Regardless of how efficient your company is, you almost certainly have sluggish, clunky, and needlessly burdensome procedures. Thinking that automation would solve inefficient workflows can lead to disillusionment. Your processes will become ineffective automated procedures because of automation.

Effective workflow automation necessitates a reassessment of your organization’s business practices. Before you attempt to automate outdated workflows, you may need to restore or entirely rebuild them. Don’t be scared to divide the colossal process down into smaller sections. Breaking processes into smaller steps might increase agility while decreasing siloed data in your business. For example, industry businesses commonly have 250-400 processes, where CPA Firms commonly have 45-70 workflows.

An excellent place to start is picking a process that doesn’t require drastic changes to your existing functions, such as invoice approval. If done well, the automation of this process can lead to multiple benefits without disrupting many of your current processes.

5. Analyze Your Company’s Business Process Management (BPM)

Sometimes problems occur that have nothing to do with a particular procedure. Instead, the issues are a product of more profound disarray inside the organization. As a result, incorporating workflow planning and mapping into your everyday routines and implementing business process management (BPM) solutions into the company becomes critical. You want to turn your organization into process thinkers constantly looking for a better way to do things.

BPM can assist in keeping the company on track. It can help the company define priorities. Moreover, the right BPM can help plan for errors at a higher level.

Disruptions in one or two workflows become considerably less of an issue when effectively managed by the entire company. So, if you aren’t currently using BPM methodologies in your business, start now.

The earlier your business eliminates ineffective procedures and replaces them with successful ones, the smoother your workflows would become. If you have targeted the proper market, buyers should quickly discover everything about the product and business through their social media accounts.

Bonus Tip: Don’t Delay Automating Your Office or Business

Don’t overlook the signals that your firm needs to be automated. As a result, your company can consolidate its back-office operations, streamline marketing activities, and cut expenses.

However, establishing automated business processes is not always straightforward. Hopefully, these 5 best practices for automating your office workflows have helped you understand the actions you must take. Unfortunately, several stumbling blocks and blunders might derail your efforts all along the way.

Hiring a professional expert is the key to avoiding these stumbling blocks. Most importantly, the contracted expertise can place your company on a path to quick success with process automation. In addition, you may benefit from the experience of an automation specialist by collaborating with them. They will not only design the apps your organization needs to automate workflows, but they will also design a business-defining strategy to get you there in perhaps the most effective manner possible. In conclusion, you can’t outsource the understanding of your processes. You must know and maintain these with your personnel. You can’t let the expertise leave with the consultant.

Learn more from K2 You can learn more about workflow in our K2 course Workflow and Automation Essentials.

Randy Johnston

Excel's STOCKHISTORY Function is Now Available

3/4/2021

 
Recently added to Excel is the new STOCKHISTORY function. You can use this function to retrieve historical prices for stocks as of a given date or range of dates. Read on, and you will learn how to use this feature to query historical securities prices into an Excel workbook.

Introducing STOCKHISTORY

Excel’s STOCKHISTORY function is finally rolling out to subscription-based versions of Excel. Unfortunately, this function is not yet available with perpetual licenses of Excel, such as Excel 2016 and Excel 2019. Presumptively, Microsoft will add the function to the next new version of Excel.

With this feature, you can retrieve historical stock prices for stocks by simply entering a few variables into a formula. Moreover, you can retrieve values for a single date or a range of dates. Further, if you choose a range of dates, you can designate daily, weekly, or monthly intervals. STOCKHISTORY displays date and closing price by default. However, you can optionally choose to show opening price, high price, low price, and volume if desired.

Using STOCKHISTORY

The syntax for using the STOCKHISTORY function is relatively simple, as indicated below. However, note that of the arguments available, only the stock and start_date are required. Thus, a formula using STOCKHISTORY could be as simple as =STOCKHISTORY(“MSFT”,“1/29/2021”). Of course, this formula returns the closing price for a share of Microsoft stock on January 29, 2021.

Additionally, you can create more sophisticated formulas using STOCKHISTORY if your needs require additional information. Specifically, the full syntax of a formula can include all the following items.

STOCKHISTORY(stock, start_date, [end_date],[interval],[headers], [property0], [property1] [property2], [property3], [property4], [property5])
  • stock: The identifier for the financial instrument targeted. This reference can be a ticker symbol or a Stocks data type.
  • start_date: The earliest date for which you want information
  • end_date (optional): The latest date for which you want information
  • interval (optional): Daily (0), Weekly (1), or Monthly (2) interval options for data
  • headers (optional): Specifies if the formula returns additional header rows with the array
  • property0 – property5 (optional): Specifies which information to include in the result, Date (0), Close (1), Open (2), High (3), Low (4), Volume (5).

Extending the previous example, we can create more powerful formulas that use the new function. For instance, we can use the following formula to use the STOCKHISTORY function to generate a listing of closing prices for a range of dates:
=STOCKHISTORY(“MSFT”,“1/1/2020”,“12/31/2020”)
To illustrate, Figure 1 below provides an abbreviated set of results from the formula shown above.
Picture
Figure 1 - Sample Results Using STOCKHISTORY


Another Example of STOCKHISTORY

Next, the ensuing example of the STOCKHISTORY function incorporates optional arguments to add columns for the Open price, High price, Low price, and Volume for each trading interval.

=STOCKHISTORY(“MSFT”, “1/1/2020”, “12/31/2020”,,1,0,1,2,3,4,5)

For example, Figure 2 illustrates an abbreviated set of results using this formula.
Picture
Figure 2 - STOCKHISTORY with Optional Arguments

Of course, you can use STOCKHISTORY results in the same fashion as if you entered the data manually.

Summary

In short, STOCKHISTORY is one of the most widely-anticipated functions added to Excel in recent years. If you have a subscription-based version of Excel, you should already have access to this feature or receive access soon. Importantly, you can use STOCKHISTORY to retrieve stocks’ historical prices and incorporate them into other calculations in your spreadsheets. Therefore, the next time you need to perform research to obtain historical data about a stock, consider using STOCKHISTORY. Most importantly, if you do, you will reduce the amount of time you spend retrieving data.
You can learn more about STOCKHISTORY and other Excel features and functions by participating in a K2E Canada Inc. training class. Additionally, you can learn more about STOCKHISTORY by reading this Microsoft article.

View a Video Tip That Demonstrates STOCKHISTORY


Tommy Stephens

Excel's New LET Function Can Simplify Your Formulas

9/7/2020

 
If you access Excel through an Office 365/Microsoft 365 subscription, get ready for the new LET function.  LET began appearing in select releases of Excel in July 2020 and will continue to roll-out over the upcoming year. In essence, LET allows you to declare and store a variable inside a formula. Once you establish the variable with LET, you can then use that variable repeatedly in the same formula. In this article, you will learn how Excel’s new LET function can simplify your formulas.

LET Fundamentals

“Old-school” programmers no doubt remember the days of declaring variables in a computer program using a LET function. While writing code, programmers might include a statement such as “LET x = 100.” With “x” established as the value of “100,” they would then use that variable in other calculations. Excel’s new LET function provides essentially the same functionality, with one notable difference. With LET, you can only use the variable you declare in the same formula that contains the LET function.

As a simplified first example of working with LET, consider the following formula in Excel.

=LET(x, 100, SUM(x, 1))

The formula shown first establishes “x” as a variable with a value of “100.” It then adds that value to “1” to produce a calculated value of “101.” The fundamental example provided is just that – a simple example to introduce LET. Let’s turn our attention to some more practical uses of LET. But first, let’s describe why LET is potentially beneficial to Excel users.

LET Benefits

According to Microsoft, LET offers two primary benefits: 1) Improved Performance and 2) Easy Reading and Composition. More specifically:

  1. Improved Performance.If you write the same expression multiple times in a formula, Excel calculated that result numerous times. LET allows you to call the expression by name and for Excel to calculate it once.
  2. Easy Reading and Composition.No more having to remember what a specific range/cell reference referred to, what your calculation was doing, or copy/pasting the same expression. With the ability to declare and name variables, you can give meaningful context to yourself and consumers of your formula.

From the above, we can conclude that LET allows us to improve our formulas by making them easier to understand while simultaneously speeding calculation times.

A Practical Example of How the LET Function Can Simplify Your Formulas

In this illustration, let us assume that a loan officer is deciding whether to approve a mortgage on a house. Further, the bank’s policy is to charge 0.5% more interest if the applicant’s credit score is less than 800. In this case, we can use the following formula to calculate the monthly payment based on the inputs shown in Figure 1.
=LET(Rate,(IF(B4>799,B2,B2+0.005)),PMT(Rate/12,B3*12,-B1))
Picture
Figure 1 - Using LET to Calculate a Payment Based on a Credit Score
In the formula pictured above, the LET function declares a variable named “Rate.” Further, the LET function uses a nested IF function to retrieve the value from cell B4 and determine if it is less than 800. If so, the interest rate increases by 0.5%. Finally, the formula calculates the monthly payment by incorporating the “Rate” variable established by the LET function. In this example, using LET facilitates creating a more concise calculation than would otherwise be possible.

Further, the advantages of using LET increase as the complexity of the calculation increases. For example, if the loan officer establishes the interest rate based on three tiers of credit scores instead of two, the value of using LET magnifies significantly.

Summary

Excel’s new LET function allows you to simplify calculations in Excel by declaring variables within a formula. Once you establish such a variable, you can use it repeatedly in the same expression to ease the process of creating complex calculations. In this context, Excel’s new LET function can simplify your formulas. Therefore, as this feature becomes available to you, carefully consider how you can use it to get better results in less time.

Learn More About LET in this Video


Tommy Stephens

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    Authors


    Ward Blatch
    Ward provides consulting and training services as the Managing Director of K2E Canada Inc. He joined K2E Canada in 2005 and is responsible for the Canadian operations of this international consulting group, which provides professional development technology education for accountants across Canada and the US. Ward lives in rural Nova Scotia and can be reached at ward@k2e.ca.

    Tommy Stephens
    Tommy is one of the shareholders in K2 Enterprises, affiliating with the Firm in 2003 and joining as a shareholder in 2017. At K2, Tommy focuses on creating and delivering content and is responsible for many of the Firm's management and marketing functions. Tommy resides in the metro Atlanta area. You may reach him at tommy@k2e.com.

    Randy Johnson
    Randy is a nationally recognized educator, consultant, and writer with over 40 years experience in Strategic Technology Planning, Accounting Software Selection, Paperless, Systems and Network Integration, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning, Business Development and Management, Process Engineering and outsourced managed services. Randy can be reached at randy@k2e.com


    Bernie Smith
    Bernie coaches businesses to develop meaningful KPIs and present their management information in the clearest possible way to support good decision making. As the owner of Made to Measure KPIs, he has worked with major organisations including HSBC, Airbus, UBS, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Lloyds and many more.

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