9 in 10 S'porean finance leaders spend their time on manual back-office tasks

About 40% of finance leaders in Singapore prioritise investments in automation.

89% of finance leaders in Singapore spend more than half of their time on these manual back-office tasks significantly higher than their peers in other Asia Pacific markets including Japan (75%) and Australia (75%),  a study released by Stripe revealed.

The study found out that because of this, business innovation has slowed down.

The focus on manual tasks not only costs finance teams their time, but also increases the risk of errors. Two in five spend between 10-25 hours per month going over manual errors or discrepancies to reconcile data. 36% report having to reopen their books or restate earnings at least once a quarter because of errors that were made after their quarterly close. These issues can add extra work for finance teams, slow down decision-making, and damage a business’s credibility.

In addition, 84% of businesses in Singapore expect to expand into new countries over the next 24 months. However, due to the challenges faced by the finance departments, about 65% of leaders think that expanding into new markets is hard and might disrupt their existing financial systems.

Consequently, automation of financial tasks becomes an investment priority for 40% of finance leaders in Singapore, second only to the digital transformation of go-to-market and sales at 42%. Other key areas of investment focus are cloud technologies at 39% and better use of data pipelines and data lakes at 39%.

The study surveyed over 200 CFOs and finance leaders in Singapore with a total of 1,700 around the world. Findings state that finance teams are spending the majority of their time on manual tasks, like copying data from one spreadsheet to another, comparing and reconciling data, or manually putting together analyses, rather than directly driving business strategy with financial data.