The last decade has seen an explosion in automation technology making its way into business processes, both large and small. 

On the other hand, at the time of this writing, only 67% of businesses currently use business process automation to streamline workflows that involve repetitive tasks. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) make up a big part of the remaining holdouts, largely because it’s not always easy to justify the potentially costly adoption of automation in situations where every budgetary dollar counts.

Indeed, according to a recent McKinsey study, the types of automation that are most commonly adopted by today’s businesses beyond the pilot phase – intelligent document processing, robotic process automation and case management – are decidedly enterprise-oriented, as they are most relevant when operating at scale.

With this in mind, it makes sense that increasing adoption of business automation technology via additional business sectors hinges on its ability to generate dependable, measurable returns. This means it's advantageous for automation advocates to focus their efforts on automation technologies that have the most potential to drive an immediate positive bottom-line impact. 

The most obvious target, arguably, lies in billing processes. It's easy to tie timely and successful billing and the capital inflows it generates to bottom-line success. And it's also easy to point to specific challenges that billing automation can help overcome. To help advance that conversation, here are three especially important strategic challenges that automated billing helps businesses overcome.

1. Accurate Revenue Projection

One of the biggest upsides associated with a business's billing operations is creating accurate revenue projections. This is a critical task for every business, because revenue projections play a determinative role in strategic finance planning. 

So, if a projection underestimates revenue, it could lead to unnecessarily delayed business projects. That might mean being late to market with a new product or failing to expand into new territory when it's most advantageous to do so. And if a projection overestimates revenue, it could lead to a business biting off more than it can chew financially and put the whole company's viability at risk.

An automated billing solution can facilitate more accurate revenue forecasts by taking some uncertainty out of the process. For one thing, automated billing platforms provide real-time visibility into invoices at every stage of the billing process. They also simplify the collection of statistical data related to accounts receivable, leading to far more accurate estimates of future receipts. 

Beyond those benefits, billing automation virtually guarantees timely payments, to help avoid any unnecessary cash flow lapses. In business finance, there are often significant gaps between bookings, billings and revenue figures, and especially in subscription business situations, the best way to narrow those gaps is with the predictability of automation.

2. Fraud Risk Prevention

Another challenge that businesses face within their billing operations is the risk of fraud. It's a challenge that carries with it a financial and reputational risk. When a scammer inserts themselves into the relationship between a business and its customers, the business – rightly or wrongly – ends up being held responsible by payment gateway processors and underwriters.

Automated billing can curb the risk of fraud in multiple ways. Firstly, it can function as a single source of truth for both the business and its customers. On another level, it can serve as a valuable data stream to power anti-fraud analytics. Some automated billing solutions even include fraud prevention functions built right in.

Automated billing solutions also cut down on billing errors, which customers may interpret as intentional efforts at fraudulent billing. By taking the human element out of the billing process, automated billing solutions reduce the odds of data entry errors and number transposition on invoices. 

In doing so, they protect the business from reputational harm that may come as a result of errant invoices issued to customers.

3. Curbing Operational Inefficiencies

Last but not least, automated billing solutions are an excellent way to curb operational inefficiencies within a business's billing workflows. This is critical because those inefficiencies contribute to profit-sapping overhead. 

Every moment's delay in the issuance of an invoice means a delay in incoming cash flow. And every barrier that slows the process of getting customer payments processed and accepted has the same effect.

Automated billing systems can streamline a business's billing workflow in a variety of ways. It eliminates duplicative processes, reduces the average time between a sale and a payment, and cuts down on how many employees end up involved in the process from start to finish. 

All of that reduces barriers to payment and the overhead associated with the billing process. The result is smoother cash flow and a greater proportion of receipts turning into pure profit.

The Takeaway

At the end of the day, automation is and will continue to be critical for businesses of all sizes. But the only way to increase the automation adoption rate is to make an unassailable business case to justify it. 

Billing automation is one of the kinds of applications that can benefit any business, no matter the industry. And as it has immediate bottom-line impacts, it's also one of the simplest automation investments to justify. The three major challenges detailed here are only a few of the benefits businesses can realize through its use. They make the perfect starting point for automation strategists to obtain executive buy-ins at their organizations, based on the obvious merits of automated business solutions.