Finance Head Licious
Ronit Mangal
Finance Head Licious
FTUL
Welcome to our finance tech series. Let’s welcome Ronit Mangal from Licious
Ronit
Hi, my name is Ronit Mangal. I’m the Finance Director with Licious. I head finance for Licious. Overall, I’m a chartered accountant by profession and I come with about 12 years of postpone experience so far.
FTUL
How do you think AI and automation will impact your company’s financial operations and reporting processes in next three to five years?
Ronit
I think the AI and the automation in terms of fan ops or the finance operations as we call it, is going to significantly bring down the monotonous or redundant activities that the finance or the AP team ends up doing in the next three or five financial years. Why? Because a lot of activities like reading of an invoice, punching of the data, manually reaching out to vendors for submitting the UTR information, or following up with the vendors for any more documentation that we might need, all of that will be solved by AI or automation and that is something that I’m looking forward to. This will bring both operational efficiencies as well as it will bring down the costs of finance operations significantly and hence I believe AI and automation is the next thing to look forward to.
FTUL
What financial metrics or KPIs have seen the most improvement due to AI and automation implementations?
Ronit
So the most KPIs or the metrics that we should talk about in terms of AI and automation is, let’s assume SLAs in terms of processing of invoice vendor, invoice management, vendor onboarding, submitting your UTR intimations, doing your GST reconciliations or invoice reconciliations with the vendors returns, et cetera. These are the major metrics that I look forward to whenever we talk about AI or automation that helps ease my life as a finance leader.
FTUL
Can you share an example of a successful AI or automation project that significantly improved financial operations?
Ronit
The last AI or automation that helped ease my life is for example of automation generation of B2B tax invoices, automatically reading and pushing finance or AP invoices to the system, bank integrations which help release payments automatically without any manual errors of payments being submitted to some other vendor in bank account accounts, automatic reading, automatic posting of accounting entries. There are enough and more examples within the finance where AI or automation has helped ease a lot of pain, so to say. Right? And has has rather invited us to spend more and more quality time on quality deliverables rather than just, you know, doing your modus operandi operandi of your manual processing of invoices etc and I guess that’s the best thing that the AI or automation has done.
