Guide: Finance team collaboration
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1 minute
February 21, 2024
There’s no “I” in team—but there is one in finance. And, too often, businesses let that shape their outlook. Finances are frequently delegated to a single person or department, even though company expenses involve and impact nearly every employee.
Now, many modern organizations are demonstrating that businesses can create greater efficiency, improve transparency, and boost performance with a collaborative, team approach to finances.
What does collaborative banking look like in practice? Let’s explore a few ways your company can evolve its principles and processes to achieve greater financial cooperation.
Control spend, boost efficiency, and earn up to 1.25% cashback with Rho.
Whether due to rigid protocols or outdated technology, traditional accounting departments aren’t always set up for collaboration. Too often, team members are focused on their duties, with very little oversight or transparency across functions.
As you might expect, this siloed approach can create bottlenecks in the workflow—not to mention unnecessary paperwork and extraneous or overlapping efforts.
Even a simple task—like paying an invoice—can become a multi-step ordeal that involves printing and circulating multiple documents for signatures. We call that busywork, not collaboration.
Whether your team is working in the same office or remotely across time zones, you can improve operational efficiency with a digital cash and spend management platform that consolidates and centralizes your financial tools (such as banking, corporate cards, and AP), documents, and workflows—so everyone has instant, shared access to resources they need.
Giving your employees easy access to financial information and insights sounds simple, but it can have an immediate impact on productivity and collaboration. With an innovative platform, team members can tackle assigned tasks right away, rather than waiting on a colleague or supervisor to input transactions or run a report.
Financial transparency—with appropriate control measures in place, of course—puts your team on the same page when it comes to budget planning and strategy, successfully measuring KPIs, and making responsive, data-driven decisions together.
With Rho’s integrated platform, you can set unique permissions for each employee, bookkeeper, and stakeholder and strike an optimal balance between access and security for your company’s financial data.
Managing spend can be a headache. Often, the “company card” gets passed around from employee to employee—a process that can lead to delays in important purchases and a lack of control. By the time a statement reaches the finance team, teasing out who is responsible for each charge and tracking down receipts can be a time-consuming task.
The key to spend management is providing more purchasing freedom without relinquishing control. This can be accomplished by using the right corporate card across your organization.
With the Rho Card, for instance, you can issue a unique physical or virtual card to each team member and cost center, bolstered by customized restrictions and spending limits, plus digital receipt uploads. Not only does this method simplify purchasing for individuals and departments, it also provides enhanced control and transparency over company-wide spend.
Even the most expertly crafted budget can fall to the wayside when not adequately communicated and monitored. From top to bottom, everyone on your team should have a clear understanding of budgeting expectations—and be able to see how their activity contributes to the bigger picture.
As your company grows, it becomes more and more challenging to manually manage budgets on a static spreadsheet. Look into a financial platform that reports and categorizes expenses in real time, so you can effortlessly track and analyze spend across cost centers and set more precise and reliable budgets moving forward.
With Rho, managers can easily create and share budgets with their team. With individualized cards and instant reporting, it’s simple to see where charges are going and connect them to specific budgets, so team members can review their progress and stay accountable to their goals.
Automation is transforming business at every level, including financial management. By eliminating tedious, manual tasks like paper-based invoice flows and spreadsheets, your team will have more time and energy to put toward growth-enabling projects.
Advanced technology is streamlining AP processes in particular. By going digital with your invoices and automating approval and payment flows, you can cut down on your financial chores, leave clear audit trails, and move on to higher-impact work.
Rho’s built-in automation helps your team work smarter, not harder, while collaborating on AP and other accounting tasks by offering:
Innovation Departments’ CEO, Colin Daretta is already reaping the benefits. “Our team is more efficient and our costs are lower because we now have everyone working together within Rho.”
Rho’s platform was created for collaboration. With all of your business’s financial needs instantly accessible on a centralized dashboard, team members across departments can view account balances, spend responsibly, report expenses, and update budgets in real time, with customized access rules and permissions in place for superior security.
Ready to take your financial collaboration to the next level? Find out how our all-in-one platform can help your team work better—together.