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Finance teams are expected to provide insights, support business decisions, and drive financial performance. Yet, many finance professionals spend most of their time doing something else entirely.
According to PwC, finance professionals spend up to 70% of their time on manual operations instead of strategic work. Rather than analyzing trends, forecasting growth, or advising leadership, they are often occupied with collecting data and responding to repetitive requests. This raises an important question: How much strategic value is your finance team losing to manual work?
The Hidden Productivity Challenge in Finance
Manual processes remain surprisingly common across finance organizations. Research shows:
- 41% of FP&A work is still performed manually
- Finance professionals spend around 10 hours per week consolidating data
- Strategic analysis only receives the time that's left after operational tasks are completed
For many organizations, data collection is only part of the problem. Finance teams are also expected to respond to a constant stream of operational questions from employees, managers, and stakeholders.
Why Repetitive Finance Requests Create a Bottleneck
Every time an employee sends an email asking for budget information or reimbursement status, someone from the finance team must stop what they are doing to find the answer. This creates several challenges:
- Delayed responses for employees
- Reduced productivity for finance teams
- Increased dependency on finance personnel
- Less time available for planning and strategic analysis
As organizations grow, the volume of these requests grows as well. The result is a finance function that spends too much time supporting operational inquiries and not enough time supporting business decisions.
The AI Solution Most Companies Never Considered
Instead of relying on finance teams to answer every request manually, companies can create an AI Finance Assistant. This is an enterprise AI solution that enables employees to ask finance-related questions through a chat interface and receive answers instantly.
For example, employees can simply ask:
- "Has Vendor A's invoice been paid?"
- "How much budget do we have left this quarter?"
- "What is the payment status for invoice INV-2025-001?"
The AI Finance Assistant retrieves the relevant information and delivers the answer within seconds.
What Can an AI Finance Assistant Do?
An AI Finance Assistant acts as a digital front door for finance-related inquiries across the organization. Employees can simply ask questions in natural language and receive answers instantly.
For example, an employee who wants to know whether a reimbursement request has been approved no longer needs to contact the finance team. They can simply ask the AI assistant and receive the latest status within seconds. The same applies to invoice payments, budget availability, spending information, and other common finance requests that traditionally require manual intervention.
Beyond answering questions, the AI assistant can retrieve information from connected finance systems, interpret the context of the request, and present the information in a way that is easy to understand. This enables employees to access the information they need without creating additional workload for finance teams.
Interested in Building an AI Finance Assistant for Your Organization?
Contact Insignia to explore how AI can automate finance inquiries, improve employee experience, and free your finance team to focus on driving business decisions.