Why Automating Financial Workflows is Key to Growth in 2026

Are you wondering why automated financial workflows are no longer optional for growing businesses? If yes, the answer rests here.

According to Flair,50%of work today is automable. Over the years, 36 million small businesses operating in the United States have utilised automation to grow their business as well.

Thus, this article intends to study automation as a tool for growth in businesses, understand the real cost of manual financial processes, and more!

Key Takeaways

The real cost of manual financial processes

How to determine if a business has outgrown its financial processes

What manual workflows are at risk

Priorities in automation

How does it align with your growth

What good financial workflows look like

Five questions to ask before opting for a workflow tool

The Real Cost of Manual Financial Processes

Manual workflows can conveniently hide the true cost. And because it goes unnoticed, it becomes even more painful.

But the numbers are significant. Industry benchmarks across thousands of AP departments show that businesses without automation spend an average of $12.88 to process a single invoice, compared to under $3 for organizations using best-in-class automated workflows.

For a business handling a few hundred invoices a month, that gap translates to tens of thousands of dollars a year.

If we just consider the indirect costs alone, before factoring in late payment penalties, missed early-payment discounts, or the time your finance team spends on work, all can be easily automated.

And this problem compounds with growth. With a rise in transactions, the pressure multiplies as well.

Fun Fact RPA can execute routine tasks 20 times fasterthan humans.

How to Tell if Your Business Has Outgrown Its Financial Processes

The main and foremost problem is realising that the business workflow has a problem.

A missed payment, a duplicate invoice that slips through, or an audit that takes twice as long as it should all depict the visible problems.

Some of the warning signs include:

Approvals stall whenever one key person is out of the office or on vacation
You’ve paid a duplicate invoice at least once in the last year
Invoices regularly get processed without being matched to a purchase order
Month-end close involves chasing colleagues for documentation that should already exist
You can’t pull a clean record of who approved a specific payment without searching through email threads

If two or moreof suc problem appears, it could be a clear signal. The process that got you here isn’t the one that will get you to the next stage.

What Manual Workflows Actually Put at Risk

When approval processes are informal, the conditions for errors and fraud both increase.

Organizations lose an estimated 5% of revenue to fraud each year, with a median loss of $145,000 per incident, and the primary cause appears to be a lack of internal controls.

For small and mid-sized businesses already operating on tight margins, those numbers hit hard.

75% of small firms cite rising costs as their top financial challenge, with over half reporting difficulty paying operating expenses.

Such circumstances make it difficult for companies to stand and pose great risks in their growth and output.

What to Automate First and What Can Wait

One of the biggest misconceptions about workflow automation is that it’s all or nothing.

In reality, the smartest approach is to start where the volume is highest and where errors would cost you the most, then build from there.

Here’s a practical order of priority for most growing businesses.

Invoice approvals should come first. They represent the highest transaction volume.
Purchase order workflows come next, because they prevent unauthorized commitments before money goes out the door.
Expense claims matter too, but are typically a lower priority unless you have a distributed team generating high expense volume.
Budget alerts work best as a second step, once you’ve got your invoice and PO approvals sorted.

You don’t need to automate everything on day one. Starting with end-to-end accounts payable automation and building outward from there gives you the highest return for the least disruption.

Why This Matters More the Faster You Grow

The urgency here scales with the business. A company adding headcount, onboarding new vendors, or expanding into new markets will see its financial transaction volume increase well before its finance team has the capacity to keep up.

This is especially true for SaaS and subscription-heavy businesses, where recurring spend commitments can stack up fast, and getting the right controls around spend early is far easier than trying to retrofit them once the gaps have already caused problems.

What Good Financial Workflows Actually Look Like

Automation means taking the informal rules that already exist in your business, who should approve what, and at what dollar amount, and building them into structured workflows that run consistently without manual intervention.

In practice, that looks like this:

Purchase orders above a set dollar amount route to a senior approver automatically, rather than sitting in a general inbox
Incoming invoices are matched against the original purchase order before they can move to payment, catching discrepancies early
Budget holders receive a notification when spending in their area approaches a defined limit, not after it’s been exceeded
Delegation rules activate automatically when an approver is unavailable, so nothing sits idle waiting for one person’s return

None of this requires months of implementation or a dedicated IT team. For most businesses, the setup takes days, not quarters.

Five Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Workflow Tool

If you’re evaluating tools to automate your financial workflows, these are the questions that will help you separate solutions:

Does it integrate directly with your existing accounting software, whether that’s QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, or another platform?
Can you set approval rules based on dollar amount, department, and document type, not just a single blanket threshold?
Does it create a complete audit trail automatically, without requiring your team to log anything manually?
How quickly can your team realistically be up and running, days or months?
Can it handle multi-step and multi-entity approvals if your business structure becomes more complex over time?

The right tool should fit into how your business already operates and scale with you as things get more complicated.

Final Word

If your business is growing but your financial workflows haven’t changed since you had five employees, the gap between those two things is costing you more than you think.

And closing that gap, starting with the highest-volume workflows and building from there, is one of the most practical improvements a growing business can make right now.